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Problems with Outlook?

Nigel Wallace-Iles

Hi,

we are having severe issues with Outlook and was wondering if anyone else has had any issues? When we send email tests from Ontraport to an email with the same @email.com, it is being reformatted and the images sometimes don't display along with 'button' bars being changed and looking awful. When we send to a gmail.com account, it looks fine. Considering most businesses use Outlook there must be more occurrences of this. We just don't want to send out our first campaign if it's not displaying correctly on receipt.

Any help would be very much appreciated and would save what little hair i still have!

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Outlook is a challenging client to design for, but our current open tickets in development are for two other issues, I think. One is for background images to work better and the other is related to the Header Title Text that shows up as 1pt text (looks like a dotted line) at the top left of the messages in Outlook.

In the past we have had specific ONTRAmail templates that required tweaking to make Outlook display consistent. I see your ticket with Michelle in Support; I've asked that she obtain the template ID / name for the ticket and escalate it to our QA team so they can test with different Outlook configurations (Exchange server, Office 365, etc.)

I don't recommend using the "Send Test Email" button from within the editor as the final determination, as it only gives a rough approximation of the final display of the email without sending it through the regular processor for populating merge fields, etc. Instead, I use a regular Contact Record instead. (I know Michelle covered this with you but wanted to mention it again here for the benefit of others). 

Frank Hagan
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Thankyou Frank. I am following this up with michelle and will be on my 2nd onboarding call tmrw. We were very surprised with the issues in Outlook as it is the most popular system in business, with or without all of it's associated problems.

 

thanks again

Nigel Wallace-Iles 1 vote
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Has there been any progress made on this Outlook problem? This has become a HUGE problem for me since most everyone that receives my emails use Outlook. I need this fixed before I can start any type of campaign or email again because it was flat out embarrassing the first time. My only fix is to send uber boring plain jane emails. I don't understand how a marketing automation platform isn't built for Outlook...I wish I had known. 

Cara Hill 0 votes
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Have you contacted Support with the specifics, Cara? They will have to look at the individual emails you are sending to determine what the problem is. In our testing the ONTRAmail templates work well with Outlook.

Frank Hagan 0 votes
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Sorry Frank, but that's not my experience at all. Also, interestingly, all your techs have advised that this is an OUTLOOK problem, not OP, and all email marketing software has the same problem with OL because their platform is so outdated. So not really sure what email templates in OM you're speaking of, unless they've all been created in HTML? As I've said before, considering 85% of businesses GLOBALLY use OL, it seems a bit of a bitter sweet pill to swallow seeing my emails arrive looking like a 5 year old made them.

Nigel Wallace-Iles 0 votes
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Nigel, the ticket Michelle was working on this issue with you, #274698,  was closed based on your comments that it can be closed. In that ticket we were looking for examples of specific messages that are not displaying well in Outlook when received because you had deleted the example we had.

We have to look at the actual email, as edited, in your account to determine the problem. Outlook is tough because they don't always honor background images, etc. If we can see the template block ID number that is the problem, we can run it through our testing to make sure.

Outlook is tough, but we are committed to making the email templates work if at all possible.

Do you have an example you can point me to and I'll re-open that ticket?

Frank Hagan 0 votes
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We are releasing another fix for Outlook images, where they are not always scaled correctly depending on the version of Outlook, on Thursday, July 19th, 2018.

Frank Hagan 0 votes
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