This is the first in a series about ContactNow and HTML Emails, as well as other ContactNow related information.
ContactNow, HTML Emails and Microsoft Outlook:
As most of our ContactNow clients have noticed, Microsoft Outlook tends to make life a bit difficult in what it supports and how it renders HTML. Outlook 2000 had the HTML rendering system of Internet Explorer, but in with the release of Outlook 2003 they changed that engine to render HTML to the Microsoft Word rendering system. This in turn has made the life of HTML Email creation rather difficult, as the Microsoft Word engine doesn’t support nearly as many HTML elements as the Internet Explorer Engine.
In this post I am going to give you some hints and tips as to what Outlook can and cannot support with regards to HTML, as many of our ContactNow clients tend to find issues when creating HTML Emails. So hopefully this post will help you with your creation of HTML Emails in the future.
What Outlook Does Not Support:
Unfortunately, for many Outlook doesn’t support very much in terms of CSS and HTML, it supports the bare minimum of CSS and limited HTML.
Most of your CSS that you have come to know won’t work in an HTML email. Don’t use DIV’s, CSS-positioning, etc. TABLES and SHIM.GIFs are your friend.
Remember if you wish to insert CSS into your email place it after the <BODY> tag as most web based email clients will strip your email of the <HTML>, <HEAD>, <TITLE> and <BODY> tags, as they don’t want your CSS to override there CSS.
The biggest unsupported issue is background images. They are not supported in either CSS format or the deprecated HTML format.
To get text to wrap in your email, you will need to place a table in your email with a specified width and place your text inside it to get your text to wrap the way that you want it to.
There is no support for animated GIF’s, nor is there support for Flash or any other media that requires plug-ins. GIF’s are displayed as static unmoving images. Flash is just displayed as a block with a red X in the corner.
Forms are also not supported.
The following CSS is not supported:
- background-image
- background-position
- background-repeat
- display
- float
- position
Below is a reference to the missing HTML and CSS properties and attributes:
1. Missing HTML elements
- applet
- bdo
- button
- form
- iframe
- input
- isindex
- menu
- noframes
- noscript
- object
- optgroup
- option
- param
- q
- script
- select
2. Missing HTML attributes
- accept-charset
- accept
- accesskey
- archive
- background
- checked
- classid
- code
- codecore
- codetype
- compact
- data
- declare
- defer
- disabled
- enctype
- longdesc
- marginheight
- marginwidth
- media
- method
- multiple
- noresize
- object
- onblur
- onchange
- onclick
- ondbclick
- onfocus
- onkeydown
- onkeypress
- onkeyup
- onload
- onmousedown
- onmousemove
- onmouseout
- onmouseover
- onmouseup
- onreset
- onselect
- onsubmit
- onunload
- readonly
- scrolling
- selected
- standby
- tabindex
- title
- valuetype
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2. Missing HTML attributes with specific values
HTML element HTML attribute
- img alt
- textarea cols
- td colspan=0
- th colspan=0
- frame frameborder=0
- td rowspan=0
- th rowspan=0
4. Missing CSS properties
- azimuth
- background-attachment
- background-image
- background-position
- background-repeat
- border-spacing
- bottom
- border-spacing
- caption-side
- clear
- clip
- content
- counter-increment
- counter-reset
- cue-before, cue-after, cue
- cursor
- display
- elevation
- empty-cells
- float
- font-size-adjust
- font-stretch
- left
- line-break
- list-style-image
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