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Trying to get rid of horzontal and vertical white spaces in HTML E-Mail.

Answer 1

A:

I see a couple of things going on here:

<tr>
<td><img src="spacer.gif" width="646" height="1" border="0" alt="" /></td>
<td><img src="spacer.gif" width="377" height="1" border="0" alt="" /></td>
<td><img src="spacer.gif" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" /></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td colspan="2"><a href="http://www.winstonsbilliards.com"&gt;&lt;img name="WinstonsAd_r1_c1" src="WinstonsAd_r1_c1.gif" width="1023" height="647" border="0" id="WinstonsAd_r1_c1" alt="Visit Our Home Page" /></a></td>
<td><img src="spacer.gif" width="1" height="647" border="0" alt="" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>

Acid test reports that your columns don't add up to total width. This may not be the entire problem, but it could be part of the problem. Either adjust your table overall width or subtract one from a td.

Outlook 07/10 doesn't support display:block formatting on your image. Also, spacer.gif is a relative link that will break when you send. Here's a great resource for knowing which CSS elements work (or don't, on Outlook) http://www.campaignmonitor.com/downloads/documents-tools/Campaign_Monitor_Guide_to_CSS_Support_in_Email_April_2010.pdf

From a UI standpoint, your page is pretty wide...most people I know run outlook with several "panes" on and this will cause it to oversize...ditto on Hotmail, causing an error dialog. Consider dropping your size down to 800 or even lower. I send out a lot of emails for work and we never go bigger than 750. Finally, outlook and Gmail disable images by default. Since there's no content there besides images, all users will initially see nothing until they take action...not good. Many will never bother to click the link, making your email ineffective to that portion of the audience. Text ain't sexy...but you are virtually guaranteed that your audience will see it. Good luck.

bpeterson76 2010-07-23 01:20:21

Hello bpeterson76 thanks for the response, after reading that you never send out e-mails bigger then 750 px, I shrunk the whole thing down to that and it got rid of the strange spaces I was experiencing. I removed spacer.gif and display:block, and apparently it still "works".I understand your point about nothing but images, for some strange reason my friend wants it to be nothing but one large image. *slaps forehead* Hopefully I can convince him it's a very very bad idea. Thanks very much for the help, I owe you many beers.

Charlie 2010-07-23 02:34:23

Here's an easy way to illustrate your challenge to someone who's not in the business: get Firefox Web developer toolbar here: http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ Once you've got it, load your email and turn images off. Voila, you just illustrated your challenge. It's too darned bad that email can't handle Leahy/Langridge image replacement, because that would solve all your problems in one fell swoop.

bpeterson76 2010-07-23 03:45:09

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Trying to get rid of horzontal and vertical white spaces in HTML E-Mail.

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