Outlook not so great with text-only email, either

After all the fuss with Outlook 2007's treatment of HTML email, you might be forgiven a resigned grimace at the "news" that Outlook does unusual things to your plain text emails, too.

Surely it's impossible to mess around with the display of a plain text email (or the text-only version sent with your HTML email)?

Apparently not.

Kudos and gratitude to the makers of Text Formatter Plus for alerting us to the following problem.

Conventional wisdom says you keep your line lengths in text emails to 60 or so characters, and add a hard return (i.e. press the enter key) at the end of each line.

This ensures your text email appears in a nice column, with no formatting gremlins. Like this:



But later versions of Outlook don't respect the hard return. Instead, they read each paragraph as one long line. Messy and unreadable when viewed in a wide window.

I didn't believe this, so fired up the Campaign Monitor design preview tool and ran the above text email through it. Now the worst you would normally expect is some format problems through the use of different display fonts. As in the Yahoo! Mail example:



Now look at the screenshots for Outlook 2003:



Outlook 2007:



...and Outlook XP:



Only Outlook Express 6 formats the line lengths as intended:



According to Text Formatter Plus, the solution is to add 3 extra spaces to any line not ending a paragraph.

And this works. Here the revised email in Outlook XP for example:



So...

• Plain text emails need design testing, too (here some design testing tools and services)
• If your plain text email is automatically generated from the HTML version by your email marketing service or software, check it works in the various versions of Outlook. If not, correct it manually.
• Consider using a text email formatting tool that takes care of this issue for you.

Tags: More on formatting plain text email | Tags: email marketing, outlook 2007, email design, text email, email formats

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