Email Builder and Spacing Issues with Outlook

For several months there has been a known issue with para/line spacing getting messed up when emails from the builder are sent to Outlook. If you are unfamiliar, basically, the top and bottom margin randomly gets set to 0 on paragraphs that have any character formatting (ex. bold, italic). Here is an example (68.9 KB)

Has anyone found a way to work around while we wait patiently for this to get fixed?

We have tried a bunch of different approaches to creating the template in the builder but nothing works…

Thanks, Chris

There used to be an setting in the desktop version of Outlook that was on by default to remove extra blank lines (it’s been years, so I don’t remember the verbiage anymore). It was driving one of my clients CRAZY & once he changed it, emails from IS looked fine to him.

I have seen - even in gmail/google mail though that sometimes blank lines are removed. To solve this, I make sure that each line that I want left (like a break between paragraphs), I also insert a space and that seems to do the trick!!

On COMPLETELY different note - I’ve been on Colleen’s list for a couple of years and keep trying to get IS peeps to invite her to speak at an event! Love her quick videos!!

Thanks for your note!

Unfortunately, this isn’t about extra line feeds. It is caused because the email builder inconsistently applies paragraph styling. Specifically, the builder inserts “margin: 0px;” for bold or italics html tags.

I can’t believe this isn’t a simple bug fix but has been going on for months and months…

I’ll pass on your wishes to Colleen. Thanks!!!

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I worked a similar case just this week that has led us to some advancements that our development team is working to implement. I know this can be frustrating. When we take on tasks like this we have to count in the variable of how other inboxes render email html, and that is what our development team is working with. Making a change to the html to cater to Outlook had to be paired to the other inboxes. This is something we are actively working to resolve still.

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Thanks for the reply.

For clarity, this is not an issue with catering to Outlook, it is an issue with the Builder. The Builder should not be inserting top and bottom margin css statements in bold and italic html tags. This is improper HTML/CSS.

Outlook is only different than other clients only in that it is not ignoring the malformed html/css from the Builder (which it should). If you fix the root cause, errors in tag creation in the Builder, then you will fix Outlook and any other client that doesn’t ignore the error.

Thanks, Chris

Hi Chris,

Yes, as I mentioned, we came across some crucial information for development this week, that aligns with this. There have been a couple ‘similar’ issues that we have been working on. This week, we uncovered some of the issues in the tagging, and we have one of our development team members taking a priority look into the cases, with the information we shared.

Hi James, do you know if this is addressed in today’s update?

Not in today’s update. We got all the information sent over to a member of our Dev team yesterday, mid-day and they are currently working on the resolution patch.

Hi James. Thanks again for your attention to this. Any update? We are coming up to the one year anniversary of when we reported this… Chris