Images keep going really big when I preview it to myself

This is something that happens to a lot of people and can be very easily fixed.

The chances are you are using Outlook 2007 as your email client, and that uses a different rendering engine to other desktop and web-based clients and affects people who have used the image resizing tool within their campaign to get their images to the right size.

When the email is sent to Outlook 2007, the client removes the code that resizes the image and leaves it in its original (and normally huge) state; making your campaign look ugly, and unprofessional.

The Solution: Images need to be uploaded to mailingmanager in their desired size to prevent this from happening.  A major hurdle for a lot of people with this is that they don’t have the software to do this.  Luckily, we at mailingmanager have found a great, free bit of software for you to use.  View the tool on CNET and download it and remove this problem from ever happening again.

Are you a Mac user?  Try this app from the Apple site.

The email keeps doing weird things after I’ve saved it (content disappearing, layout moving around, text changing font and size)

This is a very common problem we hear and some poor people keep struggling through it, re-doing the campaign again, only to find it reoccur after saving again.

The problem is down to copying and pasting from Microsoft Word, email, or from any word processing software that defines the font type and size.  The reason it causes this problem is because it doesn’t use html code to change the font format and instead uses code that WYSIWYG html editors can’t read and display correctly.  The result is that the WYSIWYG, in its attempt to make sense of the unrecognised code, will break and distort the email causing erratic (and sometimes drastic) changes to the email, leaving your shouting profanities at the screen!

The Solution: Never, ever copy and paste from Microsoft Word, Publisher, Outlook, or any other word processing program that can alter font formatting.  You have two options really:

Either type directly into the editor or, alternatively if you want to copy and paste from an existing document, paste it into the Notepad prior to pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor and then you will not bring any dodgy coding over with it.

The Email keeps expanding in size when I…

….put links in

We’ve seen this enough times for this to be mentioned as advisory to not do.  A lot of times people will put in a link such as:

http://www.mailingmanager.co.uk/reallylongurl/inasubsectionofthesite/reallylongpagename.html

This will be inserted into the email how it is above.  The problem with doing this is that the link will not split onto two lines and will instead just continue on the same line, causing it to push out the size of your email, and make it lose its desired shape.

The Solution: The link needs to be put into a hyperlink to stop this problem from happening.  Just have it inserted behind wording such as “view the rest of this article” or “read more” and you will remove this problem.

….put images in

You may have taken our advice above and resized the images to your desired size and then gone to insert it, only to find that when you do insert it, it pushes out the width of the email.

The Solution: It is a pretty simple one; the image is too big.  The reason this is included is because people normally do the whole campaign before realising this mistake.

When they look at it though, they normally see the image as having space on either side of it, making them presume that it can’t be the image causing the problem.  What they sometimes miss is that most tables have a padding value in it that makes the images and text not touch the sides to give it a nice overall look.  You can reduce the padding if you want the image to fit, but we personally recommend shrinking that image a little bit more.

These are our most common issues that we receive.  If you keep having a recurring issue that you want solving, please post a comment below or email support@mailingmanager.co.uk with the problem and we will give you the solution.