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♪♫ It's a Nice Day for a... White Message ♫♪

We recently came across a problem in Outlook.com where emails were being rendered as a blank white page. Examining the "View email source" showed us that the code had indeed been recieved. So why was the email blank?

A little bit of digging...

We tested a few different things with Outlook.com and eventually centered in on the culprit: HTML code included in a comment in the style block. It looked like this:

<style type="text/css">
 /* Link Styles, When using <a href="#" > tags */
 h1 a, h2 a, h3 a, h4 a, h5 a, h6 a { color: blue !important; }
 h1 a:active, h2 a:active,  h3 a:active, h4 a:active, h5 a:active, h6 a:active {color: red !important; }
</style>

We tried a few different HTML tags in the style block, inside comments and outside, and in every case they caused the email to display as blank. So, if you don't want to be firing blanks, EOA recommends that you do not include any HTML code in your style block.