How can I get outlook to display a background image? - html

I'm trying to get outlook to display a background-image. Is another rule I can use in it's place for outlook 2003-2015 email clients? Be see markup below.
<table class="emailwrap" style="background-color:#fff;" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" align="center">
<tr>
<td class="mbl-header" align="center" style="width:600px; height:122px; background-image: url('images/banner2.jpg'); background-repeat:no-repeat;background-size:600px 100%; padding-left:35px; padding-right:35px;">
<p style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif; color:#fff; text-align:left;"><strong>As Assistant U.S. Attorney Seth Wilkinson</strong> said in relation to a recent Lacey Act case, “The message is clear, you can’t turn a blind eye, you can’t buy products that you know are stolen, make a huge profit off it and then just say, ‘I didn’t know what I was doing</p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

Outlook 07/10/13 & Outlook.com do not support background-image (Campaign Monitor - CSS). Instead, you can either substitute sliced images (not recommended) for all email clients or a solid background color where background-image isn't supported.
Bulletproof Background Images is probably the most reliable source.

Related

HTML email signature issues

Developers and enthusiasts!
Since I have a little experience with HTML I figured it would be fun to try to create an html email signature, and it was! Until I checked the result on Litmus. So many tiny flaws I can not figure out how to fix:
• personal information appears partly or completely under the logo in Outlook on PC, instead of next to the logo.
• social media icons not visible in Apple mail, only before sending.
• correct space between social media icons in browsers, iPad mail and iPhone mail but not in Outlook on PC (or when running the code on here).
Are these compatibility problems that can not be fixed?
If they can, I need your help!
This is how the signature is supposed to look (the logo is an animation).
And this is the code:
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="800">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<p style="line-height: 11px; padding: 0px; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<a style="font-style: bold; color: #333333;"><strong>Joram Esveld</strong></a><br>
<a style="line-height: 18px; color: #017d85">branding specialist</a>
<br><br>
<a href="https://www.joramipsum.com/" onMouseOver="this.style.color='#017d85'" onMouseOut="this.style.color='#333333'" target="_blank"
style="text-decoration: none; color:#333333;" >www.joramipsum.com</a><br>
+316 12 34 56 78<br><br>
</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Let me know if you need more information.
And if anyone has any branding related questions;
feel free to ask thrue dm, or my website.
Kind regards,
Joram
JavaScript will not work in an email client.
Outlook ignores padding on images.
float mostly does not work with Outlook.
A better approach would be to divide the signature into two separate columns using td.
For more information on what works with email, try this handy source:
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
Good luck.

Mailchimp affects my Outlook-specific conditional comments in HTML

I'm having trouble getting my HTML email template to render properly when it is sent from Mailchimp to Outlook 2007, 2013 and 2016. The thing is, when I upload the HTML directly for testing on Litmus, the email renders fine across all Outlook previews. When I send the test email from Mailchimp to Litmus, the email looks out of proportion in Outlook 2007, 2013 and 2016 (for Win7).
Is Mailchimp doing something with my Outlook-targeting conditional comments, and how can I work around that?
My conditional comments seem to work sometimes to fix the width on some elements of my MC email (you'll see in the screenshots, the textbox is the right size for the top card but not on the second one). But for the life of me, I can't figure out why one works and the other doesn't, I'm writing the same comment for both.
Screenshots:
when Mailchimp sends the email to Outlook (what went wrong)
when the HTML is rendered for Outlook directly (what it's supposed to look like)
Conditional comments:
I've put in Outlook-specific conditional comments like so:
<!--[if (gte mso 9)|(IE)]>
<table align="center" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="600">
<tr>
<td align="center" valign="top" width="600">
<![endif]-->
<!--BODY TABLE-->
<table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" style="max-width:600px;">
...
</table>
<!--[if (gte mso 9)|(IE)]>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<![endif]-->
Thank you for the help! Really appreciate it.
I feel your pain, I've had the same issue for templates I was making for a client. I wanted to make the icons retina proof and let the client upload any image size he'd like. Unfortunately after many many hours debugging en searching the web, I read the following on a MailChimp post:
Outlook doesn’t recognize the HTML that constrains images. This means
that if you use HTML to resize an image uploaded to a campaign or
template, it may display at the original size in Outlook. Be sure to
resize your images before you upload them to MailChimp, or use our
built-in image editor.
source: MailChimp Knowledge Base
I didn't really believe that this could actually be true so I kept trying to constrain the images. I've put fixed width on the img, td, tr, table.. nothing helped.
Sadly I can't really explain what happens, hopefully the link to the MC article gives you a better view on it.
But my best answer is to set a max-width & width to your img and td anyway. And tell your client to resize the images to the allowed size. Setting a max-width and width will also display the #px when hovering over the editable image in your MailChimp editor. I also found out that when you do upload a bigger size, MailChimp throws a lil' warning.
If it may help in any way; see my code below that I used in my templates to make it fluid.
<table mc:repeatable mc:variant="Item with image top and CTA" width="650" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" align="center" class="full-table" style="width:650px;">
<tr>
<td style="padding:30px 20px 40px 20px;" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td style="padding-bottom:15px;max-width:610px;">
<img src="/images/img.jpg" alt="x" style="width:100%; max-width:610px;" width="610" mc:edit="article_image">
</td>
</tr>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
Are you using retina images in your emails? From experience I have found that outlook's, if they are given a big image, they display it at a big size if a specific width is not assigned to the img tag. Below is an example of a code i use for the images in my emails.
<img src="[IMAGE PATH]" width="" height="" style="width:px; height:px;display:block;" border="0">
Also can you post the img tag of the offending element so i can have a look at it better please?
Cheers

Office365 outlook mail HTML email render

I am using office365 email at my workplace to access emails. I am required to generate a dynamic newsletter which will be developed in HTML, However, I cannot seem to figure out how to add that HTML page into the email, pasting plain HTML doesn't seem to work as outlook does not render that.
I found a work around after some research, which is to open the html page on a browser, simply copy the content using CTRL + A and paste onto email editor, that seems to add the html but this is not a proper solution!
The aim is to write HTML, (Have done that) and add the HTML page into the outlook email. Any help/suggestion is highly appreciated
Both email clients and web browsers can display HTML/CSS, but they have different ways of doing so. So if you copy/paste an HTML page, chances are it will not display the same way in an email client like Outlook365.
Email layouts need to use <table>s for layout instead of <div>s. Emails also only support a small of CSS rules that need to be inlined.
Email code looks more like this:
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" align="center">
<tr>
<td valign="top" style="vertical-align: top;background: #aaaaaa;">
<span style="color: red; font-size: 12px;">text</span>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" align="center">
<tr>
<td valign="top" style="vertical-align: top;">
<img src="full path to image" alt="alt text" width="50" height="50">
</td>
</tr>
</table>
If you rebuild your email like this, it should display better in email clients like Outlook365.
First of all please look at this list of supported CSS in various email clients.
Than make sure you also have CSS inside email. Best way is using inline CSS:
<div style="color: red; font-size: 12px;">HALO!</div>
When pasting make sure you are pasting it as HTML (don't know if you can do it in all email clients). Otherwise it will encode your pasted text and sending it will expose all HTML markup as text.

HTML Emails: Center aligning tables affects cell text in Internet Explorer

I have noticed a 'bug' or whatever with Internet Explorer when viewing HTML emails. I'm using Version 11 and its still present.
If I want to align a table in the center of the page, it is also causing the text in any <td> cells to be centered, even if I set the attribute to align="left" and use inline CSS to specify text-align="left".
Here is some example code (try sending this as a HTML email to your yahoo or gmail account and view it in IE):
<table width="100%" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="background:#CCC;">
<tr>
<td>
<table width="650px" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="padding-left:11px;padding-right:11px;background:#FFF;">
<tr>
<td align="left" valign="top" style="text-align:left;">Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale's eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts.<br><br> The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale's eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
You should see that the text will be center aligned rather than left aligned. This 'bug' is only present when viewing the code as an HTML email. If you view it as a webpage then it works fine!
I have tested it using web versions of Outlook and Yahoo as well as a different online mail account and the problem is the same only in IE. I tried it in Chrome, Firefox, and Android's built-in browser and it works fine.
I don't understand how to fix it other than not to have my tables centered in the middle of the page. It doesn't look aesthetically pleasing to have my email contents to the left of the page either.
Instead of using align="center" in your parent table tag, try putting it in the parent <td>. Also lose the align="center" on your child table tag, and you don't need CSS text-align:
<table bgcolor="#CCCCCC" width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td align="center">
<table bgcolor="#FFFFFF" width="650px" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td align="left" valign="top" style="padding-left:11px; padding-right:11px;">
Your text here...
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

Html newsletter in gmail

Im coding html newsletter and faced up with strange thing in gmail. Code:
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="700" height="122">
<tr>
<td valign="top" colspan="3" width="689" height="8"><img src="http://www.url.com/img/product_top_border.gif"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="12" height="106"><img src="http://www.url.com/img/product_left_border.gif"></td>
<td valign="top" height="106" width="689">
some content
</td>
<td valign="top" width="12" height="106"><img src="http://www.url.com/img/product_right_border.gif"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" colspan="3" width="689" height="8"><img src="http://www.url.com/img/product_bot_border.gif"></td>
</tr>
</table>
Gmail screenshot:
Screenshot from other email clients:
Any hints?
Your help would be appreciated.
It's a browser issue. When you put an image inside a table, the image should be an inline element, sitting on a text line. That means there will be space below it (for parts of a line of text that go below the baseline, ie. descenders) and GMail's rendering is ‘correct’.
However, in Quirks mode, as well as “almost standards” mode, an image that is alone in a cell behaves like a block instead of an inline element, so it doesn't get the extra spacing. It looks like the ‘other’ client is in Quirks mode, as it has reset the font size inside the table (a typical Quirks mode bug).
Normally you want to avoid Quirks mode at all costs, so you'd use Standards mode and fix up the img-in-table problem by setting CSS display: block or vertical-align:-anything-but-baseline on the <img> elements, or, better, dump the ugly layout-table and use some background images instead. However of course in a e-mail context your opportunities for styling are strictly limited.
So yeah, try setting style="display: block" on the images to try to make them display the same in Quirks vs Standards if you like, but be aware that this is the least of your problems when dealing with HTML mail. You will face much, much worse breakages than that. HTML e-mail completely sucks on every level; if you have any chance to get out of it, by just mailing a link to a proper web page, then do that.
In regard to the change of fonts, it somewhat seems like the 'other client' might show a non-HTML body and I think gmail supports HTML by default.
Have you set the content-data to be HTML?
For instance in c# you might need to set:
MailMessage mail = new MailMessage();
mail.IsBodyHtml = true;