If the first line of the string passed to email.message_from_string starts with whitespace, the line gets discarded. I believe the problem is in the feed parser, but I don't have a test case to prove that. 

The attached file is a short program to illustrate the problem. When I run it I get the output shown below. The line count should be unchanged in both cases. 

leading whitespace :
    Body changed: lines in: 3  lines out: 2
left justified :
    Line count was preserved.

Platform:
  Python 2.5.1
  Windows 2000 SP4