ding! ding! ding! (that's the winner's bell). I had my account set not to receive HTML emails. This means I solved my issue, but anyone else who is trying to receive text emails will have the same issue. This means the problem is that there are no line breaks in the messages. It is stripping the html tags and not inserting the \n. I would bet that the mce editor is stripping out all line breaks for html formatting.
(testing and viewing html source of this message)... yup, that's the case.
Either figure out how and when to insert those line breaks or remove the option for text emails from the user control panel.
Thanks RedLine.