Bronto Blog

In my last post, I detailed the testing I did to find out why some of our messages were consistently breaking on Outlook 2007 machines and discovered an issue with DPI settings. If the display settings were set to use a DPI other than the default of 96, the message would render improperly. At the end of that post, I said that I would continue my research….

I tested two methods to fix the rendering issues - I have not found a conclusion yet. Hopefully detailing these tests will save you some time and frustration.

Percentage based widths

I attempted to convert the Bronto News to use percentages instead of pixels to define the widths of the sections in the hope that this would provide a fluid layout rather than fixed. The layout looked just fine in Thunderbird, but Outlook 2007 failed to render it properly and showed the same results as last time.

Images using width/height CSS attributes

A comment left by Alex Foley on the previous post mentioned that it might be the images that are throwing off the layout because Outlook 2007 may be rendering pixels differently for image files than for the rest of the HTML. I thought that I would give this a try until I discovered that Outlook 2007 does not support width and height CSS attributes. Scratch that one off for now as well. This could be a working solution, but we won’t know until Outlook 2007 supports these attributes.

Other Ideas

Another idea that I considered was to use a CSS based layout with all appropriate margin and padding values defined to lock the design in place, but again, these properties are not supported in Outlook 2007.

So, what can we do about this issue? Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a solution that will have our messages working properly across all email clients and DPI settings. At least not until all of the major email clients can agree upon and implement some standards in their rendering.

One thing that email marketers can do is to support the Email Standards Project, a group that is seeking to work with the developers of email clients to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. Once there are standards in place, designing emails that look great and perform as intended should get a whole lot easier for us. Until then, we’ll continue to test across as many email clients as we can get our hands on.

I’m going to continue trying to come up with new ways around this and other email rendering issues, and I am always open to ideas or feedback, so if any of you have any suggestions or ideas on how to conquer the DPI issue, please let me know. I look forward to your insights.

Lucas Weber
Support Associate at Bronto