2

I have a fair bit of experience coding emails and am familiar with the nightmare that is Outlook but this is a new one for me and, what's more, it only seems to be affecting some users. Basically, in our newsletter templates there is a table designed to nest the content in. It has columns on the left and right with width attributes to act as margins. For some users of 2010, Outlook seems to collapse the columns, for others it doesn't.

Is anyone aware of a setting in Outlook that might cause this to happen?

Here's a version of the code, with the contents stripped out:

<table style="FONT-FAMILY: Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif; COLOR: #4b4b4b; FONT-SIZE: 12px" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="600" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" align="center">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td rowspan="6" width="30"></td>
<td height="30"></td>
<td rowspan="6" width="30"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 40px">
<table style="WIDTH: 540px">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="TEXT-ALIGN: right; PADDING-BOTTOM: 10px; FONT-SIZE: 10px"></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table style="WIDTH: 540px" border="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td width="340"></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 20px"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 45px; FONT-SIZE: 10px; BORDER-TOP: #412878 4px solid; PADDING-TOP: 20px">
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Thanks,

M

Robert Harvey
  • 178,213
  • 47
  • 333
  • 501
user1904235
  • 21
  • 1
  • 2
  • Try to change the length units to be in px. In your code I saw some of them is just numbers without px suffix. – SaidbakR Dec 14 '12 at 14:58
  • I've had the same issue sometimes. I resorted to using spacer images. – Gareth Cornish Dec 14 '12 at 15:01
  • Thanks guys. sємsєм - doesn't look like I can use 'px' with this tag. Tried moving the width to a style tag but still no avail. Gareth Cornish - I may well end up doing the same! – user1904235 Dec 19 '12 at 16:02
  • Although after testing and looking for tips on this, it seems there are various issues with images (see [this question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10732164/do-i-need-to-use-spacer-images-when-coding-html-emails))................ I think I'm going to give up and trust that it's only affecting a small group of Outlook users. – user1904235 Dec 19 '12 at 16:20

1 Answers1

2

My advice would be to look at Campaign Monitors CSS support list for email clients; positional CSS such as margin, padding etc. are completely ignored by Outlook '10. Stay as far away as possible from CSS when using Outlook '10, code like its the early 90's and use height attributes and extra elements if needed.

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

Chris Butterworth
  • 106
  • 6