Rendering html in email notification with iCal

[Joseph Warner1]

I have an email notification which uses a custom template and it sends an iCal calendar invite within the email.  I want the message section of the email to render html but it is rendered as plain text even with the notification configured as "HTML and plain text". For comparison, I was able to find an OOB email notification "Notify Change Calendar" which sends an iCal invite and renders the message html. I'm struggling to figure out what my email notification is lacking that this OOB notification has.

Additionally, it appears that the Message HTML and Message text are ignored in favor of the DESCRIPTION field in the template. This is not a problem, since these fields were originally empty and I was only populating them to see what would happen. But this is strange since I assumed that the fields in the notification would always override those in the template.

[Joseph Warner1]

I couldn't find a solution as far as rendering html in the email notification, but it DOES appear that newlines (\n) are rendered if you enter them directly in the template's Message text field. E.g., this appears to render newlines when I add them after the DESCRIPTION: tag.

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Service-now.com//Outlook 11.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
......
DESCRIPTION: My notification details: ${description}\nStart date: ${start_date}\nEnd date: ${end_date}
......
CLASS:PUBLIC
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

I read some online comments citing that Outlook only renders the newlines if they are immediately followed by a space (\n ), however, I found this didn't matter in my particular situation.