In checking an email that I am coding (a reply-type email that my server will send), I notice that the a tag hyperlinks in my code are not working in Outlook. They work elsewhere, but not Outlook.
I know very little about Microsoft products, but I can tell you that the place I'm seeing this is in the online outlook.com you view in a web browser.
The simplest link, such as this...
Click here
...is coming through like this in the rendered email:
[http:www.yahoo.com]Click here
AND, it is not a link. It's just text. It appears as though the program is disabling the links (possibly because it finds the email suspicious of phishing, even though I added the domain to my trusted emails)???
Anyone know what is happening or how I can work around this?
I don't see anything wrong with the code you've posted, but I do know that Outlook.com will do this to links when it doesn't recognize them as valid links to an external site. Look for hidden characters, "smart" quotes instead of plain quotes, etc. in the link.
You should put the target on the link.
Like this:
Click here
Related
In our web shop we email customers after each purchase. Up until now all emails displayed properly, but now, in some cases all links inside the email is displayed as doubled plain text. This is happening only to some customers, and I can not find anything about that issue and how to solve it.
Correct Display:
Incorrect Display:
NOTE 1:
I created HTML for that email. The link is wrapped with <a> tag, but when we inspect the incorrectly displayed email, the <a> is removed and only the text is present in the DOM.
NOTE 2:
This is only happening to some customers. We checked and they don't have any ad blocked enabled. Also, this is not browser related issue since they also tried to open email on different browsers.
This happens with Outlook.com and Outlook 365 environments. If the link does not have a http:// or https:// (or other) protocol, it will do this.
Therefore, ensure all your links use a protocol, i.e. ..., and NOT ...
Just in case anyone else winds up here ... we had a similar issue
Our HTML bulk-email (sent programmatically via Exchange) showed formatted correctly in SENT ITEMS, but arrived (when viewed in Outlook) somewhat broken. It was fine if we emailed to e.g. GMail / Hotmail, so probably only a problem with Outlook rendering.
The Outlook presentation was PLAIN TEXT and not Rich / HTML. Noticeable because "View Source" was greyed out. (The content, as sent, definitely had HTML / HEEAD / BODY etc. tags, and it validated OK at W3C - Outlook removed all such HTML tags - seems strange that Outlook decided to display in plain text and then remove all the, correctly coded, HTML tags)
Some, but NOT all, yyy tags displayed wrongly - in particular the tag https://www.example.com/ was what we, eventually, found had caused the email to render (in Outlook) as plain text - all HTML tags stripped and some LINKs rendered wrongly. That HTTPS link did render correctly, but others in the same email which were coded as www.link.com/MyPath rendered as
www.link.com/MyPath<https://www.link.com/MyPath>
same with mailto: links
Removing the HTTPS:// from within the <a href...>HTTPS://xxx</a> tag fixed the problem - took us a while to find though!
So basically it seems that the HREF property should include https:// and the value within the <a> tag should NOT
I've been curious about something for a bit, that has to do with Gmail (and other clients) when displaying the content of an email.
How do they determine what is the "content" and what is the "footer" or replies/signature/etc.? What I mean is that when looking at an email that is from someone personally, Gmail will almost always, perfectly, hide the signature by default but still allow you to expand the email to see it. How do they know what to hide and what not to hide?
My Google-fu isn't working for me here, I think I'm using the wrong words maybe? I thought maybe there was something about the HTML content of the email but that clearly wouldn't be reliable, plus it works just as well with text/plain emails.
What's the "trick"?
I've found that the emails I send from my application have their links (whether normal link or button) 'stripped' by Hotmail. Other email providers I've tested like Gmail are fine though. E.g. code like the below...
<b>Book</b>
... results in Hotmail showing the following text:
[mydomain/book_request]Book
The same happens with buttons that contain links
What is the right HTML/CSS to use?
Thanks a lot
Try this:
Book
You should include a http:// or https:// in front of every link. I'm not sure how Hotmail interprets an unstyled <b> tag, but it's not the only way to bold text.
BACKGROUND:
Sitefinity CMS for my specific problem, but could be general too.
I have an email message which has an unsubscribe link in it like this:
To Unsubscribe: Click or copy paste the following link in your browser.
https://www.domain.com/unsubscribe?mailingList={|MailingList.Title|}&SubscriptionEmail={|Subscriber.Email|}
{|MailingList.Title|} and {|Subscriber.Email|} are sitefinity CMS subscriber fields. When I send out an email these two fields resolve to their respective values. Hence, the URL I get in an email is as following for example.
https://www.domain.com/unsubscribe?mailingList=mymailingList&subscriptionEmail=abc#xyz.com
The user can click on it and unsubscribe from the mailing list.
My Problem:
If the mailing list name has a space in it, the link that appears on the email is broken at the first occurance of the space(link the link shown below breaks immediately =my) and hence clicking it is like clicking a invalid URL.
https://www.domain.com/unsubscribe?mailingList=my mailing List&subscriptionEmail=abc#xyz.com
I dont understand why the space in the URL doesnt resolve to a %20.
My Trial:
I changed the order of the querystrings to see if it works(mailinglist was the last string originally, I put it in the middle)
I am fine if the URL does not get resolved into a link at all, just forcing the users to copy paste the entire URL. But, I was not able to do it as well.
I have read in microsoft forums that OUTLOOK resolves the spacing issue, when the URL is surrounded by < and > like this :
URL here:
But the URL doesnt even show up in the email just like it is not showing up here above this line.
Tested on OUTLOOK, GMAIL, YAHOOMAIL, MICROSOFT MAIL. The link is broken in all email clients.
Any suggestions on what is the best solution for this?
We've got some HTML emails that get sent out that show email addresses our service has blocked. When viewing the email in Outlook (and presumably in other clients as well) these plain-text email addresses get turned into clickable links that would compose a new message to this address when clicked.
Is there a way to prevent this from happening? Perhaps a meta tag with a flag that would prevent Outlook from converting these into clickable links?
Most email clients strip out META tags, Javascript, and other types of code not necessary for email. Outlook is going to do what it wants with your email, so what you may want to do is wrap the addresses with your own anchor tag and use a blank HREF. Then, style the link to look like the rest of your text.
I think a better answer is to formulate anything that you think a mail client might try to generate a link for in a way that breaks up the string a bit like this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/7625887/470749