We’re having this weird problem at work with our web site that has to do with sending E-blasts. Yesterday we sent a message, it was a very simple paragraph regarding times the club would be closed. We tested it by sending to my personal Yahoo account. Looked perfect. Next we sent it to our work Outlook accounts, somehow the spacing got all funky and there were extra spaces in odd places within sentences which made it look weird.
Since this is a private country club I’m sure we’ll hear from our membership about the stupid looking email. The company that provides our web software says it’s a “glitch” but I’m not sure it’s not something that Outlook is doing.
The first thing that comes to mind is coding properly for different browsers. What browser do you use to view your Yahoo mail? If it’s not IE then that may explain why there’s a difference. Outlook uses IE (or maybe the same engine as IE) to display HTML mail.
If it’s a simple paragraph, then maybe it should be sent as plain text instead of HTML.
It’s Outlook - it’s a pain in the neck when it comes to handling HTML emails. It (used to?) uses a stripped down IE rendering engine with some “interesting” quirks even when compared to IE.
I had a good couple of months worth of WTF moments trying to get consistent rendering working in Outlook a few years back. I ended up resorting to table based layouts with hard coded style attributes and non-breaking spaces; this shrank my soul somewhat.
IIRC, to make matters worse it doesn’t honour text based fall-back in the way everyone else does.
Newer versions of outlook (starting with outlook 2007) use the MS Word HTML rendering engine. This can cause it to display certain elements differently than you would you expect (or not display them at all).
How do you create the email that you send out? Where I work we have a web-based mailer app that doesn’t like Word formatting; we need to create the entire email within the app to guarantee that sort of thing doesn’t happen. Copying from Word almost guarantees something will format funky. I run any word text through Notepad to strip out any hidden formatting codes, and then past from Notepad into the app.
Also, be careful about your embedded images when sending to outlook as it doesn’t support https (for images, anyway) no matter how you configure it’s display options.
Apparently it also doesn’t support a lot of the advanced html elements, either.
The recipient’s email client is largely what determines how email is displayed, and good email blast software should understand that and account for it.
Just to answer the question, my browser is Google chrome. I didn’t attempt to open it with another browser.
But we did contact the web support department of the company whose software we’re using, they were able to look at the coding and find that there were extra spaces in the coding that were showing up sometimes. How the spaces got there is anyone’s guess. The person who typed the email blast said she just typed the paragraph (just like I’m typing this one) with no extra spaces. The web software might have been formatting it to justify which would result in the extra spaces.
Might be time to switch to Google apps. I’m not talking about the free version of Gmail, but the premium apps: http://goo.gl/6EM9Z
For what you’re attempting to do and the issues you’re having, I think it’s a superior product that also comes with a lot of other nice features to enhance the company’s business.
Outlook servers definitely modify the mail (dammit). I’m not sure whether it’s on the way out, in, or both, but I’ve seen it happen. For example, it breaks lines that are longer than some limit. (This happened on earlier versions of the server but I think might be fixed now.) The line breaking logic doesn’t even honor keeping a URL legit, if it’s in plain text.
There’s a handy little app called PureTextthat’ll strip out all the formatting in text for you, without relying on Notepad as an intermediate step. (Which I’ve also done, lots.) Nice, lightweight little program that does exactly what it says and does it perfectly. (I’m not affiliated with it in any way, just a satisfied user.) Give it a whirl; you’ll love it.
In Office 2010 (and I think Office 2007) applications, you can change the default paste settings, so that when you paste text into Word or Outlook or whatever, it is pasted as plain text, or the same formatting as the destination, or the same formatting as the source (which is what the old versions did).
Is there any advantage to using PureText instead? Is it faster than copy-paste-copy-paste?