[thelist] Well-formed HTML email

GravyFace gravyface at bmfsquad.com
Mon Nov 10 18:47:07 CST 2003


Hi all,

I'm constantly plagued with problems with mass-mailing (not spam,
newsletters :D) HTML messages to various email server/client environments.
My latest problem is with Mac Panther Mail, which is supposedly using Safari
for its rendering, a 100% W3C standards compliant browser.
I also have issues with Lotus Notes and Groupwise.  Outlook seems to work
fine, regardless of the version. URLs with query strings seem to be getting
malformed, as well as the body of the messages themselves.

However, after looking at the header of one of our mailings, I noticed that
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2600.0" name="GENERATOR"> is inserted by either
Exchange 2000, my Outlook, or VB's SMTP functions/library (the app the
mailer was written in, which I don't have the source too).  This might be
conflicting with the same meta declaration for text/html.

Any ideas?  I'd love to see some documentation/books on making well-formed,
standards compliant emails -- you would think that the mail client would be
like a browser but nothing ceases to amaze me. :)




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