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Why emails from GMail have formatting issues in Outlook?

26 August 2010

At work we are starting to move over to Google Enterprise Apps. During the process we have come across email formatting issue when emails are sent to users on Outlook (2007).

The root cause of this issue seems to be with Outlook and it’s poor HTML support. More specifically its poor support of CSS and inline styles.

As far as I can tell the GMail text editor applies font size using the style attribute on a and font face using CSS by default which Outlook doesn’t handle very well and applies a default size. The font face is applied using CSS which Outlook doesn’t support very well (if at all) so Outlook uses what ever it has set as the default (may be Time New Roman).

Using the ‘Default Text Styling’ lab helps with the main text. As long as you don’t change the font size in the text editor.

e.g.:
asdasdasd

Where as the Default Text Styling lab uses which works better in Outlook

e.g.:
asdasdasd

You can see this by clicking view source in the web browser.

Any workarounds?

http://www.email-standards.org/


Personal blog by Janaka Abeywardhana. Thoughts on topics other than Software Engineering and Product Management. All of that is over at [janaka.dev](janaka.dev) by Janaka Abeywardhana. On Github, Twitter, and Instagram

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