Email HTML tags & attributes ignored by Outlook
On this article we focus on the exact HTML tags, attributes and parameters that are ignored by popular email clients, such as Outlook, Gmail or Outlook.com.
HTML tags ignored by Outlook
Outlook is using the Office / Word HTML rendering engine which does not support all HTML 4 tags / attributes. Here is a list of tags / attributes / parameters that are NOT supported by Outlook:
applet
bdo
button
form
iframe
input
isindex
menu
noframes
noscript
object
optgroup
option
param
script
select
accept-charset
accept
accesskey
archive
background (only when there is a URL)
checked
classid
code
codecore
codetype
compact
data
declare
defer
disabled
enctype
longdesc
marginheight
marginwidth
media ( screen | print | projection | braille | speech | all )
method
multiple
noresize
object
onblur
onchange
onclick
ondblclick
onfocus
onkeydown
onkeypress
onkeyup
onload
onmousedown
onmousemove
onmouseout
onmouseover
onmouseup
onreset
onselect
onsubmit
onunload
readonly
scrolling
selected
standby
tabindex
title
valuetype
textarea
td colspan=0
th colspan=0
frame frameborder=0
td rowspan=0
th rowspan=0
background-attachment
background-image
background-position
background-repeat
clear
display
float
list-style-image
list-style-position
text-transform
word-spacing
azimuth
background-attachment
background-image
background-position
background-repeat
border-spacing
bottom
caption-side
clear
clip
content
counter-increment
counter-reset
cue-before, cue-after, cue
cursor
display
elevation
empty-cells
float
font-size-adjust
font-stretch
left
line-break
list-style-image
list-style-position
marker-offset
max-height
max-width
min-height
min-width
orphans
outline
outline-color
outline-style
outline-width
overflow
overflow-x
overflow-y
pause-before, pause-after, pause
pitch
pitch-range
play-during
position
quotes
richness
right
speak
speak-header
speak-numeral
speak-punctuation
speech-rate
stress
table-layout
text-shadow
text-transform
top
unicode-bidi
visibility
voice-family
volume
windows
word-spacing
z-index
HTML tags ignored by Gmail
Well, Outlook is not the only email client that doesn’t fully support HTML. In fact, all email clients have various HTML rendering limitations. Gmail simply ignores all code added to the HEAD email section, so you can’t define any page-wide CSS STYLE and you must use inline CSS on each line. It also pretty much ignores padding and margin declarations (margin, margin-top, margin-left, etc).
HTML tags ignored by Outlook.com
Outlook.com has absolutely no relation to Microsoft Office Outlook, when it comes to understanding & rendering HTML emails. Outlook.com ignores margin declarations (margin-left, margin-right, margin-top, margin-bottom) and it also ignores the “float” CSS style.
Are there any workarounds to the limited email HTML support?
When it comes to margins, the best solutions are to use the span padding attribute (instead of margin-top/left/right/bottom) or simply to add extra columns in your table, in order to space the desired objects.
If your email campaign targets only certain email clients, you can fix this issue by coding your email to load different code sections depending on each email client application. While it’s not a bullet proof solution, it can get your HTML email to display properly on most email clients.
However, if you want to keep your email as clean as possible, here are some quick advices on coding HTML emails:
– do not use external CSS files and do not define your CSS styles in the email HTML HEAD section. Use inline CSS;
– avoid using background images, as they usually get ignored;
– avoid designing critical parts of your HTML email as images. Since images are heavily used by many email campaign providers to generate various email delivery reports, most modern email clients choose to ignore images by default;
– do not design your HTML email using DIVs. Instead, create your layout using tables;
– do not try to nest forms / actions / javascript in HTML emails. Not only that they will not work, but it’s likely to increase the spam score of your outgoing email;
– do not use videos or Flash files inside your HTML email. They get ignored by most email clients;
– use clean, W3C validated HTML code.
Read more: how to insert clean HTML code to Outlook emails.
well information is very nice..it is true that margins collapse
but style tags in head work in outlook, like color and other settings except padding and margin
why outlook is so different,….! 🙁
[…] By the way, the reason I’m using inline CSS is because I’m sending this as an HTML email message and there are issues when dealing with this. […]
[…] Even if you insert your own HTML code to Outlook emails, Outlook will not render it properly unless you follow these simple guidelines: 1. all links and images must be linked as absolute URLs (using something like img src=”images/image1.png” will not work, you have to use an absolute URL like http://www.domain.com/images/image1.png); 2. do NOT load CSS styles from external CSS files – you have to use inline CSS. Here is a nice tool that can check & clean a HTML email file: http://premailer.dialect.ca/; 3. Make sure you use HTML tags & attributes that are actually supported by Outlook. Outlook is designed to support only a sub-set of HTML 4, so some HTML tags are simply ignored. These tags are not removed from your email code (they will display just fine on other email clients that support them), but Outlook skips them. Here is a list of ignored email HTML tags. […]