EA
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Designs breaking on forward
I'm using a modified Campaign Monitor template, so I'm pretty confident that the code is sound. When tested in Litmus it looks great.
However when the emails are forwarded the design breaks in a couple of ways.
- Header image is displaying at full width while rest of email is scaled relatively narrow (512px wide), creating a huge white space on the right hand side.
- All links are broken.
- Both versions of the bulletproof button (mso targeted and not) are displaying.
I've scoped this email and it looks like there's a class being added to everything when it forwards. To each table cell and p tag and everything. class="MsoNormal"
Has anyone experienced a similar problem when forwarding emails? Any ideas of testing strategies or should I just accept that it will be ugly when forwarded?
The particulars in this case are a Campaign Monitor template, sent through Marketo, and forwarded through Outlook.
Most of the time, people seem to just accept that forwarding breaks it. If you do find a fix do let us know!
Adding to what Alex has said, there's no telling what different email clients will do to your code on forward. Just like different clients ignore and renders different code, they'll probably do the same when forwarding.
Also, I think that's going to be something very hard to track. The best solution is to have a share button or a "forward" button that leads to a landing page where they can input their friend's email. Your sever can send the email directly to their friend's inbox.
Forwarding emails can be a pretty tricky topic, which is why our email specialist Jaina Mistry tackled it in a recent blog post: https://litmus.com/blog/when-forwarded-emails-break
Hope this helps restart the conversation, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask here or in the comments on the post!
Not sure how well this will work, but could try a mailto link to forward a link to the web version
<a href="mailto:?subject=FW: oooh cool email&body=Hi, have a look at this email http://www.web-version-of-email.com">forward to a friend</a>Support might be a bit crappy on that and if you click from webmail it might load up in your desktop mail.
On second thoughts this is probably a bad idea but gonna post it anyway as it might spark an better idea from someone else :)
Just to add to what others have said, the MsoNormal tag can't be avoided as it's hard coded into forwarding in Outlook. You'll probably find that MsoNormal isn't the issue, but rather <o:p> tags that are added and cause line breaks. Sadly it can't be controlled.
Marketo is sometimes known to try and transform certain HTML entities into characters... but beyond that, I'm not sure if I can help without an example of the original code and the sent code.