We are using phpList 3.5 to communicate with students in our school. Our outbound messages look/render as expected in Gmail, Yahoo, and other email systems except Microsoft Outlook. There are NO blank lines between paragraphs. The html code is using paragraph tags, yet Outlook renders without blank lines between the paragraphs. If we add an extra empty paragraph between paragraphs in our messages, Outlook will render a single blank line and other email clients will have double blank lines. This is very frustrating.
What can we do to get our phpList outbound messages to render in Outlook as intended with single blank lines between paragraphs?
Thank you in advance for your help.
@BeauSanders How are other emails rendered in Outlook? If you send an email from another mail client, then view the html in Outlook to see how it is different.
Good question. Other emails sent from Thunderbird, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. render properly. I do not know why HTML generated by phpList using the default editor does not provide a blank line between paragraphs. Perhaps I should change editors in phpList. I have not experimented with other editors. What editor is best?
@BeauSanders You didn’t explain what the HTML difference is between other emails that render properly and those sent by phplist.
“blank lines” should not affect the spacing between paragraphs. It may be a oddity of your version of Outlook that they do, given that other email clients do display as expected. The margin of the <p> element should control that. If the CSS that you are using does not specify margin then you could try adding that.
You should use ckeditor in phplist, that already appears to insert a blank line between <p> elements.
Thank you for your reply @duncanc . After analyzing the html code that is in the received message in Outlook, the paragraph tags have been removed and replaced with other code. It looks like the college is reprocessing the message code through its Fortimail firewall and changing the formatting. I will keep investigating.
After more testing it is evident that Microsoft Outlook is changing paragraph tags on inbound emails which is causing the problem I have been asking about. This is properly related to a security setting in Exchange, but I do not know for sure. I have written several HTML test emails and sent them to my email address at our school and in each case the blank lines between paragraphs have been omitted. I do not think there is anything that phpList can do to resolve this issue.
Moderator: Feel free to mark this thread as CLOSED.