Wildly Appropriate

Email Marketing Markup Tip for Entourage

Yesterday and today I spent a fair amount of time trying to get a very simple HTML email to render properly in Entourage. The mailing ... which is related to fundraising for the small nonprofit I work for ... it's just text. No images.... nothing fancy. But we want it to look good for everybody who receives it, and we want to have a hyperlink or two on some of the message copy and in the footer block.

So I code this thing using the simplest, leanest HTML markup possible. And then I test it across Gmail and Mac Mail and Outlook and Outlook Express. Perfect! But then comes Entourage ... the mail client that's included with Office: Mac from Microsoft. Turns out it has a bizzare quirk that causes it to display hyperlinks incorrectly unless you put an image or an HTML table in the email source. Throw junk in your code, and things look right in Entourage. Why am I not surprised? Many thanks to MailChimp for the tip