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You've just sent out your first email newslettter and it comes back all broken and bad in Outlook. You have an angry client telling you they've just sent this to 10,000 of their corporate clients and you find that your head is now on a stick. Sound familiar?

There's lots of reasons emails break in Outlook and many other browsers. I have outlined a few here for you with solutions. You can also find a full list of work-arounds here -

http://www.demonzmedia.com/DemonzBlog/?p=6

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Issue: le' designe'r decides to use tableless design and css for html email markup. Right approach right?

Result: looks like dog vommit in most email clients. Although email has been around way longer than internet browsers, the email design world is still far from having a standardised client to deliver to. The best email publishing platforms have preview functions which display emails as they will be displayed in various clients based on the complete lack of compatibility and consitency between these clients.

Solution: use tables and in element style attributes to style content. I know it sucks, but just do it.

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Issue: annoying end user has security settings in Outlook turned up to "please strike with the Star Wars missle defense system before it reaches my inbox". As a result all of your styles are stripped out due to html email markup being disabled.

Result: dog vommit.

Solution: host your html emails online as well. Send your emails as multi-part and make the text version of the email a link to your online version.

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Issue: I used tables but it still looks le crap - help me innobuzz!

Result: dog vommit. New found fondness and respect for innobuzz!

Solution: you probably used css in the header of the document. Since some email clients like gmail strip out everything before the body tag, this will cause everything to go to hell. Make sure all of your styles are in element style attributes as per my first point like <p style="color:#eee;font-weight:500;font-family:arial, sans-serif;">

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Issue: le' designe'r decided to use margin or padding

Result: sac cre bleu!

Solution: use a table instead. If you have to use a css 'clear:both' use <br style="clear:both" /> instead.

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Has Outlook or any other email client publically humiliated you lately? Dhare you world widely wisedom by posting a comment. If you need a fancy email newsletter program which will make life more pleasant, cosider going to a pro like d-news.

Keep watching the code...

Innozbuzz