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.

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As a support associate here at Bronto, I not only help to support our clients, but I do my part to support my fellow Brontos as well. One of the things that I am responsible for is testing all of Bronto’s marketing emails in the major email clients, just to be absolutely certain that our messages are being seen as they are meant to be.

All in all, this is a fairly simple task – send a test message to a number of people in our office who use the different email clients, and make sure it looks like it is intended to look. However, a couple of computers always gave me problems, both of them used Outlook 2007, and both of them mangled our normally nice looking emails. To add to the mystery, the two bad seeds would break the messages in totally different ways.

All of the other instances of Outlook 2007 in our office rendered the message just fine, so we would normally chalk it up to a setting on the computer that was making the messages render incorrectly. Some people may be able to walk away from a situation like this; I am not one of those people. This would not stand… not on my watch.

I decided to do some research and testing to see what exactly was causing this error. I settled down with the two machines to see what I could find. I looked through all of the settings that I thought could be causing the issue in Outlook 2007, but even with all of the settings the same, the messages still did not render correctly. This is when I noticed the two computers side by side just didn’t look the same, everything was much bigger on one and much smaller on the other, and this led me to check the graphics settings, which in turn led me straight to the culprit… the DPI setting.

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