Bloody HTML signatures

Russinating · 7 Aug 2018 at 13:32

If there's one thing I hate about coding it's these relics from the 90s.

I've updated ours recently to be a bit more feature-rich but I'm battling keeping it as minimal as possible by removing link styles etc. Trouble is what I see in Chrome from the template, even what I see the first time round in Gmail, isn't what I get.

The left is what I get when viewing the raw template in Chrome. It's also what I see when I first paste it into Gmail and send a test email to myself. However after some unspecified period of time it then starts looking like the right, with link borders/underlines and all.

How do I get rid of them for good?!

If you want to fiddle with the HTML/inspect it I've uploaded the template for mine to jonesmillbank.com/Russell.html.

TIA.

GravyMonster · 7 Aug 2018 at 14:23

It's a small thing, but you've put 'text-decoration' on most of the footer <a> elements twice. The second one is the most important of those (as it overrides the previous) and some of those are missing the '!important' flag, assuming that's what's making the difference.

I'd go through and ensure it's only on the elements once, and with the right flag added.

Russinating · 7 Aug 2018 at 14:31

Spunkey said:
It's a small thing, but you've put 'text-decoration' on most of the footer <a> elements twice. The second one is the most important of those (as it overrides the previous) and some of those are missing the '!important' flag, assuming that's what's making the difference.

I'd go through and ensure it's only on the elements once, and with the right flag added.

Yeah I had that from a previous template where I swear some mail software would ignore anything with !important so the one before was a fallback. I've removed it now if that's changed.

And yeah, no luck, still got underlines.

Randomface74 · 7 Aug 2018 at 14:33

Your HTML opens and closes tags in weird order, browsers might be ignoring some of your tags. E.g. View Source in Firefox and it highlights some tags as invalid.

Code:

<p><span>stuff</p></span>
should be
<p><span>stuff</span></p>

Randomface74 · 7 Aug 2018 at 14:35

btw. I have an email rule which deleted emails with attachments automatically. I'm not alone in this, it's super effective against viruses. It does mean that when someone sends me an email with a logo in their signature I don't see it. I doubt you'll change it, as a media company, but it's worth being aware of.

Russinating · 7 Aug 2018 at 15:16

It actually appears it's a bug with Chrome that strips text-decoration rules from pasted HTML code. In order to fix it I've had to edit every link manually via Inspect within the signature text field and add it to the element.style. Utterly, utterly bizzare, but fortunately there's only 7 signatures.

And yeah, I've always been on the fence as to images but it seems more and more the norm and, as you say, if you'd expect anyone to have an image in their signature it'd be a company like us. They're all linked rather than embedded/attached via CID though for that reason; I hate trying to find an actual email attachment amongst a load of images.

That's a pretty stringent rule though! It'd also block any emails from people using an email tracker which is quite a few, and certainly every single newsletter-type email.