Hey Nicholas!

 NB> I'm trying to get this program not to scrunch the empty lines out
 NB> of my replies. :/

I just checked your raw pkt and everything looks as it should, including blank lines.  Some older versions of synchro were putting '\n' characters instead of '\r' characters which is a no-no according to ftn standards for the msg_body().

 NB> > ... Lieve zestien pingu‹ns van de Apocalyps.
 NB> And to make sure that UTF-8 is still working as expected. :)

The first one was bonky but as you can see above it is all fine now.

Life is good,
Maurice

 o-   o-  -o    o-
/)   /)    (\  /)
^^   ^^    ^^  ^^
... Druncen beorg ¨e ond dollic word.
    Guard against drunkenness and foolish words.
--- GNU bash, version 5.2.32(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)