HTML Email to Outlook, outbind?

Jack Michaelson's picture

He has: 1,733 posts

Joined: Dec 1999

Hello all,

I'm coding an html newsletter for the company I work for. At the top I've made some links to the different articles in the newsletter, like so:

<a href="#article1" title="a title">text</a>

And at the article I've created the anchors to jump to:

<a name="article1"></a>

Just like you would do with any internal anchor on a webpage... so far, so good.

When I open the sent email in Outlook and hover my cursor over all the links, I notice that the title attribute does not appear as a tool tip. In stead the href is displayed. I find this weird, but ok, I can deal with it for now.
The internal anchors don't have a href attribute and for some reason Outlook decides to create something like 'outbind:extremely_long_code' and displays that in the tool tip, which looks just ugly.
Now, I did the Google trick, and it seems that this has to do with the lack of the href attribute, making Outlook think it has to be a relative path and therefor putting it's own non-standard protocol (outbind) in it. This may sound logical in a Microsoft kinda way... to me it's not.

I just want the title to appear. Anyone know how?

Thanx,

Shakespeare: onclick || !(onclick)

JeevesBond's picture

He has: 3,956 posts

Joined: Jun 2002

Argggh, I know the area of HTML in e-mails is horribly fraught with stupid problems like this one. Is it possible to use an id instead of a name. So instead of your:

<a name="article1"></a>

use:

<p id="article1">Article text</p>

I've not got much experience with this sort of thing though, and am dreading having to do it. Smiling

a Padded Cell our articles site!

Jack Michaelson's picture

He has: 1,733 posts

Joined: Dec 1999

After some more research I only found out that it seems like this is not to be fixed, thanx MS Plain
Still regretting there's no real HTML Email standard, although projects like http://www.email-standards.org look promising.

Anyway thanx for you suggestion about the internal links using id's, JeevesBond. I wasn't aware of that Smiling

Hmmm it's friday afternoon here, time for Cheers! !

Shakespeare: onclick || !(onclick)

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

I have nothing to add, except that it's nice to see you around again, Jack! I wish I could join you for that Cheers! - gotta wait another 5 hours until I can go home Sad

JeevesBond's picture

He has: 3,956 posts

Joined: Jun 2002

Yeah, good to see you Jack. Have a good Cheers! Smiling

Jack Michaelson's picture

He has: 1,733 posts

Joined: Dec 1999

Thanx, it's good to be back Smiling

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