I send out emails regularly through mailchimp – the create email action works really well. I can check for any character encoding issue in Safari, and insert markup where necessary (for £ signs etc.), but I cannot figure out how to get a background to be displayed in Outlook. It works in all other relevent clients apart from outlook.
I’m interested to see a response to this thread as I’m sure you are Nathan. A few thoughts I have, which may or may not be accurate but with my recent work on HTML emails perhaps might entice my curiosity.
First, I’ve read that you cannot use background images within the design of the email or if you do you have to set up a container table that has three columns and one row and then in the two side columns you would place your background images leaving your center column for your actual email part.
Second and somewhat unrelated in that I see that the code created through using the HTML Email action is somewhat inaccurate in regards to both its poor formatting (which I emailed SP about) and also in regards to hyperlink styles not being inline. Those shouldn’t show up properly unless they are wrapped in the ‘a’ tag itself and not in the header of the page. There is currently no way in FW to change that, but that would be the best way to have consistent styling.
Again, these are things that I “have heard” and would be interested to see by those who have used the Action and/or use it for email regularly to shed some light on it as I’m sure Nathan would too.
Outlook doesn’t support the background image CSS, unfortunately. All the guides for creating HTML emails that I’ve read suggest giving the thing you’re applying the bg image to a similar color as a fallback. So Nathan, if you made your page a sort of dark gray color you would see the image on browsers that support it, and the color on those that don’t.
On 3 Oct 2010, at 07:01, Dan J wrote:
Second and somewhat unrelated in that I see that the code created through using the HTML Email action is somewhat inaccurate in regards to both its poor formatting (which I emailed SP about)
We’ll look at any issues like this internally, but there isn’t anything happening to the formatting that will affect the design of the email in any way.
and also in regards to hyperlink styles not being inline. Those shouldn’t show up properly unless they are wrapped in the ‘a’ tag itself and not in the header of the page. There is currently no way in FW to change that, but that would be the best way to have consistent styling.
Hyperlink styles are pseudo styles (multiple styles based on an element’s state) and aren’t supported in inline styling. We will continue to look at ways around this internally but for the first version of the Action we decided to place the pseudo styles in the body tag. The clients that support them will use them and those that don’t will use the defaults.
If I make the page dark grey then I won’t be able to see the text. I need the page to be white and the pasteboard area to be dark as per the graphic I was inserting into the background.
Outlook doesn’t support the background image CSS, unfortunately. All the guides for creating HTML emails that I’ve read suggest giving the thing you’re applying the bg image to a similar color as a fallback. So Nathan, if you made your page a sort of dark gray color you would see the image on browsers that support it, and the color on those that don’t.
On 3 Oct 2010, at 07:01, Dan J wrote:
Second and somewhat unrelated in that I see that the code created through using the HTML Email action is somewhat inaccurate in regards to both its poor formatting (which I emailed SP about)
We’ll look at any issues like this internally, but there isn’t anything happening to the formatting that will affect the design of the email in any way.
and also in regards to hyperlink styles not being inline. Those shouldn’t show up properly unless they are wrapped in the ‘a’ tag itself and not in the header of the page. There is currently no way in FW to change that, but that would be the best way to have consistent styling.
Hyperlink styles are pseudo styles (multiple styles based on an element’s state) and aren’t supported in inline styling. We will continue to look at ways around this internally but for the first version of the Action we decided to place the pseudo styles in the body tag. The clients that support them will use them and those that don’t will use the defaults.
To do as I suggested you would need to contain everything inside an item and set its background color to white - which is what I thought you were doing already).
Joe
On 4 Oct 2010, at 09:08, Nathan Garner wrote:
If I make the page dark grey then I won’t be able to see the text. I need the page to be white and the pasteboard area to be dark as per the graphic I was inserting into the background.
Outlook doesn’t support the background image CSS, unfortunately. All the guides for creating HTML emails that I’ve read suggest giving the thing you’re applying the bg image to a similar color as a fallback. So Nathan, if you made your page a sort of dark gray color you would see the image on browsers that support it, and the color on those that don’t.
On 3 Oct 2010, at 07:01, Dan J wrote:
Second and somewhat unrelated in that I see that the code created through using the HTML Email action is somewhat inaccurate in regards to both its poor formatting (which I emailed SP about)
We’ll look at any issues like this internally, but there isn’t anything happening to the formatting that will affect the design of the email in any way.
and also in regards to hyperlink styles not being inline. Those shouldn’t show up properly unless they are wrapped in the ‘a’ tag itself and not in the header of the page. There is currently no way in FW to change that, but that would be the best way to have consistent styling.
Hyperlink styles are pseudo styles (multiple styles based on an element’s state) and aren’t supported in inline styling. We will continue to look at ways around this internally but for the first version of the Action we decided to place the pseudo styles in the body tag. The clients that support them will use them and those that don’t will use the defaults.
To do as I suggested you would need to contain everything inside an item and set its background color to white - which is what I thought you were doing already).
Joe
On 4 Oct 2010, at 09:08, Nathan Garner wrote:
If I make the page dark grey then I won’t be able to see the text. I need the page to be white and the pasteboard area to be dark as per the graphic I was inserting into the background.
Outlook doesn’t support the background image CSS, unfortunately. All the guides for creating HTML emails that I’ve read suggest giving the thing you’re applying the bg image to a similar color as a fallback. So Nathan, if you made your page a sort of dark gray color you would see the image on browsers that support it, and the color on those that don’t.
On 3 Oct 2010, at 07:01, Dan J wrote:
Second and somewhat unrelated in that I see that the code created through using the HTML Email action is somewhat inaccurate in regards to both its poor formatting (which I emailed SP about)
We’ll look at any issues like this internally, but there isn’t anything happening to the formatting that will affect the design of the email in any way.
and also in regards to hyperlink styles not being inline. Those shouldn’t show up properly unless they are wrapped in the ‘a’ tag itself and not in the header of the page. There is currently no way in FW to change that, but that would be the best way to have consistent styling.
Hyperlink styles are pseudo styles (multiple styles based on an element’s state) and aren’t supported in inline styling. We will continue to look at ways around this internally but for the first version of the Action we decided to place the pseudo styles in the body tag. The clients that support them will use them and those that don’t will use the defaults.