My App's email shows up blank in IE7

Question

My app sends out email to users (upon signup, welcome etc.) and they show up blank in IE. Fine in IE8, Firefox. The content-type for the email is set to html. The email has links.

Any pointers on how to solve this or workaround this, greatly appreciated.

Update: If I change my gmail view to 'basic html' in IE7, then the email gets displayed.

So what is it in my mailer code that causes blank display in standard view (atleast in gmail)

code is at http://gist.github.com/230224

Answer 1

IE isn't an e-mail client. Is this on a specific webmail client?

Answer 2

Since Internet Explorer isn't an e-mail client, I can only guess that what you mean is Microsoft Outlook. On that premise, the problem might be that Outlook's HTML renderer has in fact been Microsoft Word since 2007. Microsoft Word has terrible support for just about everything web related, so the only "fix" is to dumb down your HTML and CSS as much as possible. Opening your HTML e-mails in Word before sending them will make it easier to debug problems, but it's still going to be a royal PITA because of the poor level of support Word has.

If you didn't mean Outlook, but infact IE, I think you need to elaborate on exactly where you are seeing these problems (like what web mail client).

Answer 3

My mailer code was wrapped in a div like this:

<div style="font-family:Georgia;margin: 10%;">

The problem is with the margin:10%;

Once I removed it, the emails were displayed fine in ie7.