Why is entourage in my code mangling my wordz?

December 15, 2006 10:23 AM

Why is Entourage mangling email text in email newsletters?

I'm in charge of sending out my company's email newsletters. I create them in Dreamweaver, and check them in Firefox, Safari, and they even look fine in MAC's mail program. Apparently though, the text below images in entourage is mangled into giberish. Why is this happening?

posted by drezdn to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Are you using Entourage because your company uses an Exchange server? If not, try sending it with a different application, like the included Mail.app in your applications folder.
posted by smallerdemon at 10:46 AM on December 15, 2006

Response by poster: I don't use entourage to send it, I use a batch email program, someone who received it send they use entourage to read it, and that it mangles the text below images.

I guess, I'm looking to see if there are any known issues with Entourage's handling of an html newsletter sort of thing, or elegant workarounds.
posted by drezdn at 10:50 AM on December 15, 2006

After much rooting around, I found an http://scriptbuilders.net/files/sendcomplexhtmlwithinlinefiles20040.4.1.html">AppleScript you can use with Entourage 2004 that will properly parse outgoing HTML.

There are articles about this script here, and here.

Good luck. :)
posted by smallerdemon at 10:54 AM on December 15, 2006

Wow, I really mangled that last post.

My apologies.

The script is located for download HERE.
posted by smallerdemon at 10:56 AM on December 15, 2006

Ah, damn, I'm not being to swift today (or this week for that matter). I see, you're saying that the person reading it in Entourage is getting it mangled?

That's a setting on their specific Entourage client. Is it this single user that's having the issue, or have you heard from other Entourage users?

For the record, I receive a plethora of HTML email newsletters and I use Entourage and it works fine. Perhaps it's a font or encoding issue on the user's side?
posted by smallerdemon at 11:02 AM on December 15, 2006

Response by poster: No one else has reported a problem with it, but I don't really use any non-standard fonts or fancy tricks.
posted by drezdn at 11:25 AM on December 15, 2006

I have two suggestions for areas to explore:

1. Entourage sometimes has issues with text encoding (though my experience has been that messages will be blank when this happens). You could experiment with going to Entourage >> Preferences >> Mail and News Preferences -- Read >> Languages and change the Default character set for unlabeled messages. Setting it to Unicode (UTF-8) would be a good first try.

2. There are a couple of fonts that sometimes get erroneously substituted on the Mac -- Helvetica Fractions and Times Phonetic are the usual culprits. Try disabling those fonts and then running FontNuke -- http://homepage.mac.com/jpietry/apps/fontnuke/

Also, with the message open you can go to View >> Source to view the raw text of the message and confirm that it's a display issue and that the message isn't getting mangled on it's way to Entourage (I'm guessing that's not the case here, but I mention it as a general Entourage trouble-shooting technique).
posted by fuzzygerdes at 12:21 PM on December 15, 2006