I've had some experience trying to generate/send html newsletters, and gmail (and possibly other web-based email clients) will modify your html in ways beyond your control. These modifications are not documented (at least, no where I've been able to find), and may change without warning. Modifications usually involved things like stripping out javascript, and most css. For formatting, put everything into a table (think web layout before css was invented...). And gmail apparently strips all non-critical whitespace, so your original html becomes one long line of text, then it inserts linebreaks every 60 characters or so (sort of like Text::Wrap, I'm guessing). This will sometimes result in a non-printable character inside of an anchor tag's href attribute, which breaks the link. You can fix this by inserting bogus non-breakable spaces in your html upstream (hopefully at the end of a line where it won't show) - this is like "padding" that you can use to "bump" the bad characters outside of the link. But it's like dominoes: fixing one may break all the ones that follow. Previously, my newsletter looked great everywhere except from inside gmail. Now, I can make it look good in gmail, but it's a painful, tedious process. If anyone has a better method, I'd like to hear about it, too.

In reply to Re: gmail -- sending out html messages by scorpio17
in thread gmail -- sending out html messages by iaw4

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.