Contact email to Volunteer Applicants is a string but should be formatted

When I take the "Contact" action on Volunteer Applicants, the email that gets sent is an unformatted string, looking like this:

The text needs to be formatted, with line breaks, and without the leading and trailing quotes.

For extra credit, it would be great to see Hi {{volunteer_name}} in the beginning. Sometimes it's not easy to figure out who the volunteer is only based on the email address that I receive in the CC'ed message.

What I see on the screen when creating the message looks like this:

Notice how there is a line break after "Hi, " in the input text, but in the outgoing email, it's all concatenated.