Inconsistency In Email Testing

Nate Laning 2

As of late, our organization has been having a horrible time with inconsistency in our text emails. We have been seeing HTML code seeping through to the email at random times. Yesterday, a </span> tag appeard in the body of our email. Today, a </strong> tag appeard in the body of a different email. Both occurences happened while viewing test messages in MS Outlook.



Similarly, our test emails will contain extra spacing in the middle of words. During one test, we'll see the word "Family" shown correctly. Then in the next test, it will appear as "Fami ly" with absolutely no changes made in the editor. In fact, looking back at the editor to correct the issue, there is no space in the word.



I displayed both errors in screenshot images. At this point, the inconsistency of creating quality emails in Online Express is making us question whether or not we should continue using the program. Communication coming from our college needs to be excellent, but Online Express threatens our ability to do that.







 

Chris Martin

Thanks for posting this Nate. We're going to dig into your specific emails below to get to the root of what you've observed. I might reach out to you direclty offline if we have any difficulties pinpointing the specific messages you show below.



I'll also be creating a specific support case so that we can document what you observed and follow through to permanent resolution.



Finally, I'll come back to update this post for the community with what we found and what steps we're taking.

Chris Martin

Just a quick update here...we think we are close to the root cause of what Nate reported. From what we can tell so far, some email clients like Outlook are in some instances interpreting an "end of line" character in the underlying text of some Online Express emails as a "space" character instead. The result is that in those email clients, a space character is showing up in unwanted places as seen in Nate's 2 examples below.



I will post an update tomorrow, hopefully with detail on what we're going to do prevent this from occurring in any email clients going forward. Thanks for your patience with this as we get to the bottom of it.

Chris Martin

Another quick update...we're still testing and are just trying to confirm our assessment from yesterday about the insertion/interpretation of the end-of-line character. I'll post another update just as soon as we have the results of those tests. Thanks again for your patience as we get to the bottom of this.

Chris Martin

Just closing the loop here finally. I believe we have this issue fully resolved. We were indeed eventually able to reliably duplicate the issue and after deploying a fix to resolve the issue on Friday, we have since been unable to duplicate the issue anymore.



If you encounter any issues that you think are related to this, please click the Help icon in Online Express and choose the option to chat with our Support team. Please reference this thread and our Support team will have a direct line into our product developement team and we'll be able to dig right in.



Thanks!

Nate Laning 2

Thank you for working on this, Chris. We will watch for the extra spacing in the future and let you know if it turns up again.