[SOLVED] HTML Emails recieved in Zimbra Web Client look BAD!.

[Orbit_Design]

We are a design firm that recently switched to the Zimbra Suite. I am noticing that HTML emails that we create for ourselves and for our clients look very poor when received in the Zimbra Client vs. Outlook, hotmail, yahoo mail etc. These are html emails that we create in dreamweaver and send out via a 3rd party email company. It almost seems if Zimbra has no support CSS tags for formatting text, background color, etc. Below is an example of an email we recently sent out for a client and you can see how it looks inthe Zimbra Web client and then in Outlook. Can anyone tell me more about the html/css support in the Zimbra web client? Or why this might be happening.

Thank you.

John

[MeneM]

Well, first off, HTML was never meant for Emailing.

It was meant for webpages, hence the browser has to support CSS and whatnot.

Text was meant to be used for Emailing. Later on, some HTML was used for prettifying the text, like bold, italic, a little color here and there. But never like you are displaying here I'd say.

I've never had a mailing look pretty when the sender sends a complete webpage to me. I tend to block the images, and most mail clients do that by default. (I don't like the tracking that can be done that way.) Sending the images with the email may even be worse, for the email just get's too big.

I'd keep it simple, and perhaps include a link to this webpage online.

Just my 2cents.

[Rich Graves]

In all seriousness, I can't tell which of your two pictures is supposed to be better. Both look OK to me. I'd slightly prefer the top example because the more consistent font is easier to read and there's no extraneous color on the sides.

Your designers should know how to build things that degrade gracefully.

Incidentally, you say that it looks OK in Outlook. 2003 or 2007? Is the sender in your personal "safe sender list"? I ask because Outlook 2007 would be unlikely to render something like your second example, and it would take a lot of work to build the first. See Microsoft takes email design back 5 years - Campaign Monitor Blog

[Dirk]

Given that people will want to send fully formatted emails regardless of what argument is used to claim that it's "wrong" etc, we should look for ways to make it work correct even if we dont agree with it.

Personally, I dont much mind either way. If the email contains correctly formed HTML, then it should render to the best ability of the broswer. ZCS should not be blocking anything reasonable within the html email.

Please show us some of the souce code that generated the above examples as without that, there's no possible explanation.

[Orbit_Design]

Originally Posted by Rich Graves

Incidentally, you say that it looks OK in Outlook. 2003 or 2007? Is the sender in your personal "safe sender list"? I ask because Outlook 2007 would be unlikely to render something like your second example, and it would take a lot of work to build the first. See Microsoft takes email design back 5 years - Campaign Monitor Blog

I'm painfully aware the limitations of Outlook 2007. That bottom screenshot IS from Outlook 2007 - granted after clicking "download images".

Everyone has their opinion on HTML email - good or bad but as Dirk states - that's not the issue. The issue is that a majority of email clients support HTML and CSS but zimbra seems to be lacking.

HOWEVER - I've been playing around more with the code and almost have the html email looking the way we intended it. The key culprit is to make sure and use INLINE styles vs styles defined in either the head or body. The only other element that I seem to have issues with is a simple background color but have worked around that with a container div with background color.

Attached is the latest email as it looks in ZIMBRA web client.... which good or bad is how it is intended to look...

So, for all intents and purposed I would call the issue SOLVED.

PS. if yuo are like us and have html emails already using stylesheets and don't want to go through the painful process of converting them to inline styles - I found this nifty online converter...

Premailer — preflight for HTML e-mail — dunae.ca

[p24t]

I'd see this being a problem for any web-based mail solution. Unless you have the inline style definitions, it's possible for any CSS to get overridden by the CSS of the mail client itself, or for them just not to mesh 100%.

Programs have it far easier, since they're not starting off by being a web page with all their own style information.