Bullet Points in ULs Not Showing Up in Windows Mail, Outlook Express, and More


It was recently brought to our attention that sometimes bullets do not render in Windows Mail. After further research, we learned that if you have a CSS “width” property set in a containing UL, your bullets will not render in Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Outlook 2003 and Live Mail. Once you remove the width property, it will resolve the issue.

For example, change:

<ul style="width:250px; padding-top: 20px; margin-top: 2px;">

to this:

<ul style="padding-top: 20px; margin-top: 2px;">

Also, Thunderbird 2 renders bullets like diamonds rather than circles.

One suggestion to resolve this in every email client is to create a table for every bulleted list and use images or an HTML entity as the bullet itself.

For example:

<table>
<tr>
<td><img src="https://www.example.com/dot.gif"></td>
<td>Insert text here</td>
</tr>
</table>

OR

<table>
<tr>
<td>&bull;</td>
<td>Insert text here </td>
</tr>
</table>

Doing it this way will also help you to control the bullet point margins and spacing so that it is consistent across all email clients.