Hi All. Thanks in advance for your help.
We're having an issue with notification emails not "loading" in Outlook for desktop on Windows. Has anybody else experienced this?
Here's a screenshot https://prnt.sc/1v1gzmx
Notification emails work fine when opened with other clients: Gmail, Outlook online, Outlook on phone, Outlook on Mac. But when I or my clients open the notification emails in Outlook desktop for windows, the email is blank with animated loading dots at the top of the email.
The notification is the default notification email. My clients and their IT and I can't open these emails, and we've all got different receiving email services. The one thing in common is that we are all using the same client to check the emails.
I tried support and they weren't able to solve this. I can't imagine I'm the only person who has experienced this issue. Any tips to troubleshoot would be appreciated.
Am I the only one experiencing this issue?
Hi @Alex Bell - I've never seen or heard of this particular issue myself. All my notification emails come through fine for me in outlook on windows 10.
But I usually get my email templates from places like https://designmodo.com/postcards, https://www.campaignmonitor.com/email-templates/responsive, https://get.foundation/emails/email-templates.html, or themeforest.net.
The key thing to note though is outlook doesn't understand .svg files. So all your image paths should be directly linked to a .png or .jpg file on your site instance or external server.
Hopefully that helps!
@DJ Lesniak Thanks for your reply.
Good tip on the SVG. I'm using the stock template, so not the thing causing my issue.
Update: I contacted MS support and they confirmed that they think it's an issue with the formatting of the email. I'm waiting to hear back from them as to what specifically it might be.
My quick resolution was to strip out all the html from the default email notification template and now the forms emails are loading.
I'm surprised nobody else has had this issue.
In case somebody is seeking a quick resolution, that's your immediate solution. I'll keep this thread updated as I get back information from MS. Perhaps there is a compatibility change that Siteglide could implement in the default email notification template.
Hmm - I’m not sure about a default email notification template. I’ve never used that or know where it is. But I figured it was something with the email itself cuz the options I sent always work for me.
Thanks for the update @Alex Bell !
@Alex Bell If it is something we need to change then give me a nudge and we'll take a look.
Thanks @Dean Vizer . I'll update here when I hear back from MS about what exactly was creating the issue.
I did run the template through the W3C's html validator and got a few errors, including having the style tag in the body. I resolved the HTML issues, but that didn't resolve the body of the email displaying in Outlook desktop. I'm not that familiar with HTML4, so I'm not sure if those errors were erroneous.
Update:
I heard back from the MS Outlook Backend team and their suggestion was to try to use plain text format for the email. Seeing as I have it working as an HTML email with a different template, I'm going to stick with that.
Additionally, they are going to forward this issue to the MS Outlook Desktop development team for review, but there is no turn around time for that the ticket is closed for now. They are going to compare the working and non-working HTML versions of this email to try to fish out what the difference might be. I'll update if and when I hear back on this.
I've reviewed the HTML myself on a few testing platforms and have found it difficult to fish out any issues with the HTML itself. One checker suggested including a char set meta attribute and removing the strong tag. I haven't had time to test this.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=UTF-8" />
If I have time I'll loop back to see if that makes a difference.
@Dean Vizer Has this email notification been tested with cross email client testing services like litmus?
@Alex Bell We’ve not tested anything no as we only provide a very basic default layout that just contains
<p>tags, we do not provide anything by default with a strong tag.The emails within the HTML (and their templates) are fully customisable though so you can make any changes as needed within Admin