I'm Gonna' Flip This Table.
July 21, 2020 1:56 PM   Subscribe

I use gmail (for not-for-profits) for work and regularly receive emails from multiple people (10+) at a huge agency that are never, ever formatted properly. This happens occasionally with smaller agencies, too. My coworkers do not have the issue and, in fact, if they receive an email and forward it to me, the formatting is perfect. What the heck is happening and how can I fix it?

I'm not sure what info would be helpful, so I'll try to give as much as I can here - and happy to answer any questions to clarify. This has been going on for a long time but has become much more of a problem for me lately because, thanks to certain projects, I'm getting multiple emails per day with this issue.

I use gmail with a custom domain (as in, my email address is myname@agency.com, not @gmail.com). I regularly receive emails that have tables embedded in them (not an attachment). When I do, there is no formatting - so instead of columns and rows, I just get row after row. It's impossible to decipher how the table SHOULD look, so I am usually forced to email the sender and ask them to re-send as an attachment - things end up delayed much longer than I'd prefer.

There isn't a single sender from the big agency that gets through to me with proper formatting.

NONE of my coworkers - all using the same gmail setup - have this issue. They receive the email looking as it should, with proper formatting. If they forward the email to me, it looks perfect.

AdBlock and Privacy Badger are disabled for the site.

The cruddy formatting happens no matter what computer I'm using (windows laptop/desktop or linux desktop) and on my (android) phone using the Gmail app.

I think I have played around with every setting related to formatting (turned them off and on) and some unrelated to formatting, too, in desperation.

I have contacted the big agency to confirm that they don't have a shared address book (they use Outlook) with some weird setting for my address and that there isn't some setting on their side - they don't and there isn't.

I am the google account admin for my agency, so have access to All The Things here.

Please, please for the love of tables, please help me.
posted by VioletU to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)
 
Can you send mail to yourself from offsite? Can you forward mail to a different account and see if the formatting comes back? Just trying to debug here.
posted by Obscure Reference at 3:20 PM on July 21, 2020


Sounds to me like it's an issue with plain text email vs. HTML email settings. By design/for safety I receive everything in plain text, and have to right click in Outlook to show html if there is important formatting like tables in the email. If I don't, it's just rows upon rows of text.

- Check to make sure you are not using plain text yourself to send emails. If you sent someone an email that was in plain text, sometimes email clients will insist on replying in plain text too. In GSuite in a browser, hit Compose. Then click the three dots next to the trash can. Is it set to Plain Text Mode? If so, un-check it.

- In Outlook, the autocomplete address entry somehow contains plain text/html format information, and it gets encoded in any emails sent to a specific address when that address is added in the To: field via autocomplete. Can you ask someone there to delete the Outlook autocomplete entry for your email address, then retyping your address anew and try sending something with tables again?

I also admin my NGO's GSuite account, and I went through all the settings there to see if there was anything that might affect this. I don't see anything there that you could change to correct this, sadly. Personally, I think your hunch that it's on the big agency's end is correct. Perhaps you sent an original email in plain text at some point, and their system is stuck on that now.

It must be super frustrating, sorry. Hope you get it sorted!
posted by gemmy at 3:20 PM on July 21, 2020 [5 favorites]


If you forward the email to a colleague, does it display correctly for them? And if they then send it back to you, does it look right?

If the answer to both questions is yes, then a quick workaround would be to open a new dummy work account and set up a filter to automatically forward relevant emails to the dummy account. On that account, set up a filter to automatically forward emails received from you back to your account.

If the answer is no, then maybe you could set up a dummy account just for those agencies to reach you at plus a filter to forward those emails to your regular account. Quicker and less work on their end than re-sending as attachments.
posted by trig at 3:48 PM on July 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


Do html tags (e.g. <table>) show up in the unformatted mail?
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:26 PM on July 21, 2020


Blocking those 1x1 pixel tracking GIFs at your site/domain but not other peoples' mail providers or networks?
posted by wenestvedt at 6:17 PM on July 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


Your first step is to verify that if you view source on both accounts the email source is the same.
posted by turkeyphant at 7:29 PM on July 21, 2020


I agree with turkeyphant and gemmy. This is most likely 'plain text' vs 'HTML' and doing 'view source' at both the sender and receiver will reveal part of what's going on. I think you are receiving plain text for some reason.

Found this in Gmail help after searching... It says to turn images on (HTML would be required for images so I'm guessing they're trying to make it 'simple' for people). It's worth a try anyway
posted by TimHare at 8:44 PM on July 21, 2020


Are you allowing images to be displayed from that sender? I am thinking along the same lines of wenestvedt, that maybe there are some invisible pics to nudge things into place. I know we're talking about html tables, so that doesn't make perfect sense. I am thinking maybe gmail is disabling more than just standard image extensions when it disables images. Enabling images has fixed some broken e-mails in gmail for me before.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 8:54 AM on July 23, 2020 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thanks everyone! I tried all of the things above AND also re-nudged the other big agency. They did some testing on their side (including sending me emails in various ways, from various accounts) and determined that it WAS something on their side - the 4th or 5th 'test' email came through with a beautifully-formatted table. (They declined to tell me what they changed, but I assume their first assertion that it wasn't an issue with an agency-wide Outlook entry for my address was in error. I am delighted to have the formatting and grumpy that I can't leave a note here for any future people with this issue.)
posted by VioletU at 4:11 PM on August 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


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