Outlook fails to render HTML email at all, reckons it's plain text, displays source.

August 16, 2010 1:44 AM

TechFilter: Outlook on one laptop is displaying the source of some incoming HTML emails as the email instead of rendering it. Anyone met this before?

On one HP Windows 7 laptop a recent version of Outlook is displaying the source of incoming HTML messages instead of properly displaying the message. It just reckons it's plain text and here you go, headers and all. It's from specific senders in specific circumstances (not random), but still doesn't make a lot of sense. I do not have the luxury of being able to sit at this laptop and just keep throwing stuff at it until it sticks, so I'm hoping someone has met this problem before.

Unfortunately, Googling for this problem mostly points me to people bitching about how Outlook's HTML rendering is a bit off, or how to view the source of a message. Help.

posted by krisjohn to technology (6 answers total)

I remember running into something a little bit like this, where under a certain set of conditions Outlook calendar notifications that people sent showed up as plain text. It wasn't my job to fix it unfortunately (and I don't think anyone figured it out, anyways.)
posted by XMLicious at 2:03 AM on August 16, 2010

are the specific emails sent from a php backed website, and do they travel through a spam/virus filtering service?

the php email module (perhaps just some versions) by default makes messages that are slightly out of spec but still mainly work fine. and some spam/virus filtering services (well, at least one I know of) chokes a bit on these and further mangles them past the ability of some email clients to understand.

if this is it, the only solutions are changing the php server configuration or not using the spam/virus filter service. :(
posted by russm at 2:26 AM on August 16, 2010

(having checked one of the servers we saw this problem on)

if you have the ability, ask the site admins to change the php config to include

mail.add_x_header = Off

and see if that fixes it. this reduces the server admin's ability to trace mail abuse in some hosting environments, so they may not want to run it in deployment, but in our case that wasn't an issue.
posted by russm at 2:49 AM on August 16, 2010

I don't have a Windows box to get the specific instructions for you, but buried deep in Tools/Options (probably Advanced options, too) is a setting to display mail from certain senders as plain text.
posted by coriolisdave at 2:58 AM on August 16, 2010

I suspected the anti-virus/anti-spam filter also, but when disabled the problem persisted. (BTW: It's Trend if I recall correctly.)

And it's not the "display email from user X as plain text" option either, because for one user it happens to some emails but not others.

Extra stuff I should have put in the original post: The place doesn't use Exchange, just a normal old POP3/IMAP server, but an outsourced one with a good name. Also, I've confirmed that the messages arrive safe and sound at the server by using the webmail interface. It's not until they hit the laptop that they're screwed up.
posted by krisjohn at 5:17 AM on August 16, 2010

Solved. For anyone interested, there's a hotfix for Outlook 2003 running under Vista or Windows 7 so it doesn't break HTML messages with "undisclosed-recipients". Googling for that should find what you need.
posted by krisjohn at 1:49 AM on August 24, 2010