Community Forum

When I first started using Email on Acid, my emails looked fine in AOL Aim Mail, Outlook 2003 and Yahoo New. A few days later, there was a problem (the same problem) with all three. It’s as if someone changed the rendering code.

Here’s what’s happening: Spaces aren’t showing up between paragraphs. For example, the following…

would normally look like this…

Dear Nancy,

How are you?

Instead, it’s rendering like this…

Dear Nancy,
How are you?

I conducted a real world test using all three email clients and they all displayed my email correctly. My guess is that someone over there changed a few things and not for the better. Just wanted to let you know.

Update: I sent my email using another method and it did show up in Yahoo Classic and New looking that same as it’s rendered on this site. However, it showed up correctly in the other clients.

It’s really irritating that paragraph tags can create a completely different look depending on what email client is used. Does anyone know how to work around this or do I just have to use breaks throughout my email?

You bring up a great question!  The issue (and seemingly random result) is caused by default web browser CSS combined with default email client CSS. 

The best way to overcome the issue with paragraph tags is to use embedded or inline css to control margins inside your email and thereby override the defaults.  For example:

  The other option, which you stated above is to simply use BRs.

When using web based email clients (such as Hotmail, AOL, G-Mail, or Yahoo) recipients can receive an email using any of the popular web browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, or Safari).  Therefore, we recommend that you first test your email in each of the popular web browsers before you run an Acid test. At this time, it is our intention to display the web email client results as it would appear in the web browser you are running your test in.

If you find a discrepancy, please use the “report a discrepancy” feature in the acid test result, that way we can pull up the exact code you are looking at and attempt to resolve the issue. 

Thanks for your feedback and happy testing!

I always use double breaks (<br><br>) instead of paragraph () tags in emails.  They’re more reliable.

And… always validate your code. When I’ve validated my code and then pasted it in at emailonacid, I’ve removed several issues in various email clients.

Here’s the link to paste in your code and validate:
http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input

Thanks so much thumbslinger for posting to our forum. 

Our system now validates your code so you don’t have to use any other tools.  When you submit your HTML, we validate it based on your doctype.  From there you have the option to continue forward or cancel your test.  This feature is intended to help developers save time in testing. 

If you are using a credit and our code validation tool picks up on anything, you have the option to cancel the test and avoid using a credit.

ahendrickspriority: if you use only break tags, are you not wrapping paragraphs in tags?  For validation, breaks should only exist within paragraph tags, so perhaps you’re just adding breaks at the bottom (inside) of a paragraph to add spacing to the bottom of paragraphs? 

acidadmin: thanks for the validation in the tool!  This indeed does save time, and knowing prior to running the test allows us to back out and fix anything before waiting.  Awesome work!