Re: [PHP] HTML & plain text in Outlook 2007

Hey Guys,

Thanks for all the info on this. Sorry for the late reply, but 
I got sidetracked writing the module that will send out all 
these nasty emails.

I do have the text going on top, and I think I said, looks 
perfect in Evolution and Thunderbird in both text and HTML.

I also read about MS ripping out the IE renderer and going 
back in time basically.

I thought the solution of converting a Word document into HTML 
with open office is interesting. I'll run that by the client 
and test it out.

Bottom line is, HTML is just a total pain, and yes, the email 
the client created in HTML using the most update to date CSS 
and HTML!

Thanks!

Skip

Robert Cummings wrote:
> Ashley Sheridan wrote:
>> On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 13:44 -0500, Robert Cummings wrote:
>>>>
>>>> What about signing yourself up to some newsletters to see how they do
>>>> it?
>>>>
>>>> Looking at the ones I get from Facebook as an example, they use the
>>>> boundary codes you mentioned, and I can't see anything particularly
>>>> special that's been added. What order are you sending the two message
>>>> parts by the way? I think the traditional way is to send the plain/text
>>>> part first, so that UA's that don't understand or support multipart
>>>> messages only use the first one. As you mentioned that you're seeing
>>>> HTML code at the top, I'd hazard a guess that you're sending the HTML
>>>> first?
>>> The problem is most likely NOT his email structure, but the fact that 
>>> Microsoft in all their lock-in, make things difficult, non standard, 
>>> monopolistic philosophy chose to switch out the IE HTML renderer 
>>> (which was getting pretty decent with IE7 and IE8) with the Office 
>>> HTML renderer... so now basic things like CSS padding of something as 
>>> simple as a <p> tag is not possible. You now need to use margins 
>>> instead. The full list of supported attributes / CSS can be found here:
>>>
>>>      http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx
>>>
>>> Obviously creating HTML emails was getting too easy (like it is with 
>>> Thunderbird). Of course... I guess it could be as bad as Google 
>>> stripping out the stylesheets entirely when viewing HTML content 
>>> which forces you to put the styles on the tags themselves.
>>>
>>> ... actually I'm not sure what's worse... at least you can use 
>>> standard styles with Google's gmail. Either way... making nice 
>>> looking HTML emails that work across Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, 
>>> Yahoo, and Hotmail is a pain in the ass.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Rob.
>>
>>
>> If he's getting HTML output at the top of the email, I would think that
>> did suggest that MS Word didn't like the structure. Making HTML emails
>> is now such a difficult job, as the email clients rendering engines tend
>> to not get updated as often as browsers, and there doesn't seem to be
>> any effort in bringing the rendering of the email clients together.
>>
>> Whenever I create these emails I try to make sure I try no to get too
>> creative in the design, and use not only CSS styles, but properties of
>> the HTML tags themselves. It means I end up writing the CSS essentially
>> twice and backing it up with old deprecated HTML attributes, but it
>> usually does the trick.
>>
>> Is there any effort by some standards group that email clients could
>> benefit from?
> 
> I think I skipped over some relevant information in the original post :)
> 
> Still... as you've said... email HTML sucks... and MS made it worse.
> 
> Cheers,
> Rob.

-- 
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Skip Evans
PenguinSites.com, LLC
503 S Baldwin St, #1
Madison WI 53703
608.250.2720
http://penguinsites.com
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