On Monday morning, Robert (with his permission, that’s actually his real name) emailed me, upset. He’d just seen his newsletter at a client’s office and wanted to know what was going on. “The pictures were broken,” he said. “And they’d been replaced with a message about privacy.”

After a bit of discussion, it became clear: Robert had never seen what his newsletter looked like by default in Outlook.

Because he used Outlook himself, he’d seen how other peoples’ newsletters looked. But he’d always assumed other publishers had done something wrong and that his newsletter looked “right” for everyone.

Email Newsletters are Unpredictable

Before we get into the technical stuff of what happened and what you need to do, you need to know something. Unless your newsletter is printed, you can’t know exactly how it will look for other people.

The way colors display depends on your reader’s monitor settings. Whether or not images appear depend on their email program settings. And the fonts that are displayed can usually be changed on the reader’s side as well.

So, if you’re going to publish an email newsletter (and this is true both for HTML and plain text), you need to just accept that you have less control than you might like over the design.

(By the way, not even a pdf strictly resolves these problems, and it can introduce display problems of its own.)

If you want absolute control over your design and how everything looks, you’re going to have to publish a print newsletter. Otherwise, just accept it and learn how to manage the differences.

What’s Going On?

First, if you haven’t already, you’re going to need to enable images to see this. (Or, view this article online.) Otherwise, the rest of this article isn’t going to make much sense.

Figure 1 displays what an all-image email (in this case, from Urban Outfitters) looks like in Outlook 2003 with the default privacy settings. See the lovely message Outlook automatically adds saying, “To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of this picture from the Internet”? That’s exactly what your readers are seeing, too.

The message does vary depending on the email program, but it’s not just Outlook that blocks images these days. (So, most likely your readers aren’t seeing images by default, no matter what program they’re using.)

If you’re starting to think this is a bit outrageous, just wait . It actually gets a bit worse.

Not only do some email programs block images (replacing them with messages about privacy), but they also block CSS. CSS is something designers use to make your newsletter look especially nice. It can be used to set a font and certain size for your text, to set up colors and headlines, and more. (It’s actually pretty advanced stuff, really, but in most newsletters it’s used in a more basic way.)

What this means is that if your newsletter uses CSS to set your body text as 10 point Verdana (what this paragraph should be displaying in), and your reader has CSS disabled, your body text could be showing up as
16 point Times New Roman
(or whatever their default might be).

See how that could make your newsletter look dramatically different?

Display Challenges Aren’t a Crisis

If you’re starting to feel pretty outraged that your newsletter is showing up looking so “wrong,” you’re not alone. But, before you really start to panic, find out what it really looks like. In Outlook, simply right click on the email and mark it as “junk.” That’ll move it to your junk email box and disable the images.

Once you know what it looks like in a default display for your readers, you can set about making it right using next week’s installment as a guide.

Of course, if you’d rather not do it yourself, get in touch. Otherwise, watch for the guide on May 14.

Want to share a screen shot of what your newsletter looks like without images? Got thoughts on what this means to email marketing? Leave a comment.