Getting text emails displayed as intended
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At the beginning of this section I mentioned that different email software and setups will display incoming email in different ways. As with websites, there is no real way to be certain that your email will always appear as you intended.
There are, however, a few practical tricks you can use to ensure that the outcome is as close as possible to your original.
The four biggest problems with the display of text-only newsletters are:
- line lengths
- links
- characters
- justification
Line lengths
Email software has a nasty habit of breaking up lines of text in inconvenient places. As a result, your carefully written newsletter can appear like this:
Email software has a nasty habit of breaking up lines of text in inconvenient
places. As a result, your carefully written newsletter can appear like this.
The solution is to keep lines short and add hard returns at the end of each one. The consensus is that restricting each line to 65 characters offers the greatest protection from jagged formatting problems.
When editing and formatting a text newsletter, set your editing software to a width of 65 characters with automatic hard returns.
If your software can't do this, you can simply adjust the margins of your text editor so the lines wrap at 65 characters. Then when you're done, run the cursor or mouse down the side of the page and hit the enter button at the start of every line not already preceded by a hard return.
Links
Often a newsletter will keep to a 65 character line length, only to include a URL which far exceeds this length. This is often the case when displaying third-party advertisements, which may include peculiarly long URLs for tracking purposes.
Long URLs, just like long lines of text, may be broken into two lines by an email client, so they might look like this:
http://www.adtracker2036.com/cam/nova/serv45/1234AD
FG.3456hgrts.html
This often makes the URL unclickable, or only the first line is clickable (and takes you to the wrong address). A big email no no.
Clearly, you want all URLs listed in a newsletter to be clickable. In other words, they should be written such that the greatest possible proportion of email clients and setups correctly interpret the URL as a link, and make it clickable.
To ensure this, make sure:
- all URLs are written in full, for example http://www.keepingthekey.com/ and not www.keepingthekey.com
- there is a space immediately before and after the URL.
This can mean unusual punctuation if you put a URL in brackets or at the end of a sentence:
( http://www.keepingthekey.com/ )
Visit http://www.keepingthekey.com .
Normally it should be possible to rephrase the text so that this kind of odd punctuation is not required.
Now, most of you are probably wondering how such a URL can ever not appear clickable.
Well, some email clients fail to recognize URLs with non-conventional endings, such as .exe. And we still haven't solved the problem of the overly-long URL.
Redirects can solve the latter two problems. You create a page at your website with a shorter URL. When someone follows this short link and reaches the web page, they are automatically redirected to the actual destination URL. For example:
The URL http://www.keepingthekey.com/KTK/
...perhaps takes you to a page containing the following HTML code (all on one line):
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=http://www.adtracker2036.com/campaigns/nov/server 45/1234ADFG.3456hgrts.html">
This would send the visitor straight on to the adtracker2036 website.
As well as ensuring the clickability of links, the redirect approach can also smarten up a newsletter by giving all the outbound links a consistent look. In addition, you can use your website's visitor statistics to see how many readers clicked on the link.
In fact, the redirect approach is often used with all links, even the inherently clickable ones, to exploit these advantages.
If you don't want to set up redirect pages yourself, there's commercial software available which will do a similar job for you .
There is a downside to redirects though. Some people can get confused if you point to a third-party website, but the link appears to go to your own website. Some readers will question why the end destination URL is not revealed in the newsletter and assume some dark motive.
They might assume the newsletter is using a redirect to mask the fact that the link has been paid for, or involves some other financial connection between the newsletter and the end destination.
Odd characters
Another problem with the display of text-only newsletters is how email clients handle "odd" characters, which is anything outside the standard ASCII character set.
Despite the myriad of modern word processing tools available, it therefore pays to create and edit text-only newsletters using a simple text editor. Email clients will then faithfully reproduce any character you can create.
More advanced word processing software often inserts "odd" characters, such as the trailing dot character or smart quotes, which can cause display problems in some email software.
My recommended editing tool is NoteTab, which includes spell checking and various other tools. In fact, I'm so comfortable with it that I first write all my documents (including this report) in it, and transfer to Word etc. only for final editing and formatting.
Justification
Our final problem is justification, i.e. the alignment of text on the page. Many email clients display text messages using a fixed-space font (Courier).
This means every space and character takes up the same amount of width. Knowing this, you can center and right justify text using the space bar. In this example, hitting the space bar ten times before the text centers the message between the dividers:
*********************************
Text centered
*********************************
The fixed-space trick also lets people use ASCII characters to create special text effects and graphics (so-called ASCII art), for example:
/ __\___ ___ | |
/ / / _ \ / _ \| |
/ /__| (_) | (_) | |
\____/\___/ \___/|_|
The problem is that some email clients are set up to view text in a different font, one without fixed spaces. Look what happens to our centered text and "cool" graphic in the Verdana font:
*********************************
Text centered
*********************************
/ __\___ ___ | |
/ / / _ \ / _ \| |
/ /__| (_) | (_) | |
\____/\___/ \___/|_|
The solution is to avoid ASCII art in your text newsletter and justify your text so that it still looks passable in other fonts. Be particularly careful when centering or right-justifying text using the space bar.
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