[DUG-TO] Simplenews blank messages

[Alan Dixon]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Ben Smith Lea <systems at bikeunion.to> wrote:
> My investigation of News got kicked off when I was trying to solve a
> problem with Simplenews messages appearing blank in certain mail
> clients -- particularly, but not exclusively Yahoo Mail (Classic).
> Where Simplenews subscribers are not drupal users (and they do not
> have to be) there is no method to request text/plain email, and the
> problem is that some mail readers don't like multipart/alternative
> mail. Or multipart/alternative with a base64 encoded part.  Or
> something. It is very time consuming to troubleshoot that stuff.

yes, design for e-newsletters is very different from design for the
web - web-based mail readers often add their own styles, and the width
is likely to be less. i've had my best luck going back to old
table-based layouts if you want multiple columns, and only using
in-line styles.

i doubt it's an encoding issue that you're running into - I can't
believe anybody's mail reader doesn't understand multipart/alternative
anymore.

you will have to make some kind of compromise with any included
graphics, but that's probably a whole different issue.

> Anybody know what I am talking about? I have found some threads on the
> subject, but not in relation to Simplenews per se. Perhaps it is
> something to do with the site's provider.

Debugging is pretty much impossible unless you have access to the
failing setup exactly, so you can visually see what looks wrong and
also look at the html that's trying to be rendered.



-- 
Alan Dixon, Web Developer
http://consulting.civicrm.ca/