E-mail Client Rendering = Boo

Director of Corporate Marketing Greg Davis and I had been pulling our hair out for three hours over a problem with how an e-mail blast we sent today to our customers was ‘breaking’ in Microsoft Outlook 2007.  Turns out it’s not our fault (no really it’s not… well, at least not totally).   Maybe a little.

You see, Microsoft in all their wisdom re-engineered the popular e-mail client in its 2007 release to render HTML-based e-mails using Microsoft Word.

Now, you would think that HTML is usually written to appear well in WEB-BASED browsers.  Microsoft’s popular (although buggy) browser Internet Explorer comes pre-installed on every version of Microsoft Windows since Windows 95.   Also, you cannot install Microsoft Office 2007 without the latest updates to IE already installed.

The solution, we finally found, was to program the e-mail using an old version of HTML with tables, no styles - with exact heights and widths on every single element using pixels (width=” 500px”) and NO percentages (width=”100%”).

The moral of the story…  Just like checking your website in multiple browsers… it pays to check your e-mail blast in multiple e-mail clients.   What looks great in 80% of browsers may look terrible in the other 20% and it’s often better to take the time to make things perfect in 100%.

Special Kudos to art director Chris Pawloski and E-mail Programmer Ryan Senese for helping to slice and re-slice the e-mail to meet 100% compatibility.

Ryan provides the following related resource:  A Guide to CSS Support in Email