css padding is not working in outlook

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21474239

Question

I have following html in email template.

I am getting different view in MS Outlook and in gmail for the same.

<tr>
    <td bgcolor="#7d9aaa" style="color: #fff; font-size:15px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; padding: 12px 2px 12px 0px; ">
    <span style="font-weight: bold;padding-right:150px;padding-left: 35px;">Order Confirmation </span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
    <span style="font-weight: bold;width:400px;"> Your Confirmation number is {{var order.increment_id}} </span></td>
</tr>

In gmail

In outlook

How to fix this?

Was it helpful?

Solution 3

I changed to following and it worked for me

<tr>
    <td bgcolor="#7d9aaa" style="color: #fff; font-size:15px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; padding: 12px 2px 12px 0px; ">                              
        <table style="width:620px; border:0; text-align:center;" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">               
            <td style="font-weight: bold;padding-right:160px;color: #fff">Order Confirmation </td>                    
            <td style="font-weight: bold;width:260px;color: #fff">Your Confirmation number is {{var order.increment_id}} </td>              
        </table>                    
    </td>
</tr>

Update based on Bsalex request what has actually changed. I replaced span tag

<span style="font-weight: bold;padding-right:150px;padding-left: 35px;">Order Confirmation </span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
<span style="font-weight: bold;width:400px;"> Your Confirmation number is {{var order.increment_id}} </span>

with table and td tags as following 

   <table style="width:620px; border:0; text-align:center;" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> 
      <td style="font-weight: bold;padding-right:160px;color: #fff">Order Confirmation </td>
      <td style="font-weight: bold;width:260px;color: #fff">Your Confirmation number is {{var order.increment_id}} </td>
   </table>

OTHER TIPS

Unfortunately, when it comes to EDMs (Electronic Direct Mail), Outlook is your worst enemy. Some versions don't respect padding when a cell's content dictates the cell dimensions.

The approach that'll give you the most consistent result across mail clients is to use empty table cells as padding (I know, the horror), but remember to fill those tables with a blank image of the desired dimensions because, you guessed it, some versions of Outlook don't respect height/width declarations of empty cells.

Aren't EDMs fun? (No. They are not.)

Avoid paddings and margins in newsletters, some email clients will ignore this properties.

You can use "empty" tr and td as was suggested (but this will result in a lot of html), or you can use borders with the same border color as the background of the email. so, instead of padding-top: 40px you can use border-top: 40px solid #ffffff (assuming that the background color of the email is #ffffff)

I've tested this solution in gmail (and gmail for business), yahoo mail, outlook web, outlook desktop, thunderbird, apple mail and more. As far as I can tell, border property is pretty safe to use everywhere.

Example:


<!-- With paddings (WON'T WORK IN ALL EMAIL CLIENTS!) -->
<table>

    <tr>

        <td style="padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px">
            <!-- Content goes here -->
        </td>

    </tr>

</table>


<!-- Same result with borders (assuming a white background-color) -->
<table>

    <tr>

        <td style="border: solid 10px #ffffff">
           <!-- Content goes here -->
        </td>

    </tr>

</table>


<!-- Same result using empty td/tr (A lot more html than using borders, messy on large emails) -->
<table>

    <tr>
        <td colspan="3" height="10" style="height: 10px; line-height: 1px">&nbsp;</td>
    </tr>


    <tr>

        <td width="10" style="width: 10px; line-height: 1px">&nbsp;</td>

        <td><!--Content goes here--></td>

        <td width="10" style="width: 10px; line-height: 1px">&nbsp;</td>

    </tr>


    <tr>
        <td colspan="3" height="10" style="height: 10px; line-height: 1px">&nbsp;</td>
    </tr>

</table>

<!-- 
With tr/td every property is needed:
- "height" must be setted both as attribute and style, same with width. 
- "line-height" must be setted because the default value may be greater than the wanted height.
- The "&nbsp;" is there because some email clients won't render empty columns. 
- You can remove the "colspan" and still will work, but is cleaner, especially when inspecting the element in the browser's console.
-->

In addition, here is an excelent guide to make responsive newsletters without mediaqueries. The emails really works everywhere:

https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creating-a-future-proof-responsive-email-without-media-queries--cms-23919

And always remember to make styles inline. This is important because some email clients does not support the <style> tag:

https://inliner.cm/

To test emails, here is a good resource:

https://putsmail.com/

Finally, for doubts about css support in email clients you can go here:

https://templates.mailchimp.com/resources/email-client-css-support/

or here:

https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/


EDIT:

For problems using borders in outlook you may try adding this snippet to your email head (outlook supports <head> tag):

<head>
    <!--[if mso]>
    <style type="text/css">
        table {border-collapse:collapse; border-spacing:0; margin:0}
        div, td {padding:0;}
        div {margin:0 !important;}
    </style>
    <![endif]-->
</head>

Outlook assumes borders of the table cells should not overlap unless using border-collapse:collapse in the table styles.

To create HTML in email template that is emailer/newsletter, padding/margin is not supporting on email clients. You can take 1x1 size of blank gif image and use it.

<tr>
  <td align="left" valign="top" style="background-color:#7d9aaa;">
    <table width="640" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0">
      <tr>
        <td align="left" valign="top" colspan="5"><img style="display:block;" src="images/spacer.gif" width="1" height="10"  alt="" /></td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td align="left" valign="top"><img style="display:block;" src="images/spacer.gif" width="20" height="1"  alt="" /></td>
        <td align="right" valign="top"><font face="arial" color="#ffffff" style="font-size:14px;"><a href="#" style="color:#ffffff; text-decoration:none; cursor:pointer;" target="_blank">Order Confirmation</a></font></td>
        <td align="left" valign="top" width="200"><img style="display:block;" src="images/spacer.gif" width="200" height="1"  alt="" /></td>
        <td align="left" valign="top"><font face="arial" color="#ffffff" style="font-size:14px;">Your Confirmation Number is 260556</font></td>
        <td align="left" valign="top"><img style="display:block;" src="images/spacer.gif" width="20" height="1"  alt="" /></td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td align="left" valign="top" colspan="5"><img style="display:block;" src="images/spacer.gif" width="1" height="10"  alt="" /></td>
      </tr>
    </table>
</td>
</tr>

Just use
<Table cellpadding="10" ..> ... </Table>
Don't use px.Works in MS-Outlook.

Padding will not work in Outlook. Instead of adding blank Image, you can simply use multiple spaces(& nbsp;) before elements/texts for padding left For padding top or bottom, you can add a div containing just spaces(& nbsp;) alone. This will work!!!

I had the same problem and ended up actually using border instead of padding.

Do this instead:

<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
  <tr>
      <td bgcolor="#7d9aaa" width="40%" style="color: #ffffff; font-size:15px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; padding:12px;">
        Order Confirmation
      </td>
      <td bgcolor="#7d9aaa" align="right" width="60%" style="color: #ffffff; font-size:15px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; padding:12px;">
        Your Confirmation number is {{var order.increment_id}}
      </td>
  </tr>
</table>

It is better to use two cells and align the content, than using large padding and &nbsp;'s.

After doing many tests in Litmus, i could not find a way to have perfect rendering in all emails readers, but here is the better solution i found :

<table  width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="background-color:#333;color:#fff;border-radius:3px;border-spacing:0;" >
    <tr>
        <td style="width:12px;" >&nbsp;</td>
        <td valign="middle" style="padding-top:6px;padding-bottom:6px;padding-right:0;padding-left:0;" >
            <span style="color:#fff;" ><strong>Your text here</strong> and here</span></a>
        </td>
        <td style="width:12px;" >&nbsp;</td>
    </tr>
</table>

In this piece of code, i aimed to emulate padding : 6px 12px;

There are 2 "12px table columns" that handles the right and left padding.

And I'm using "padding: 6px 0;" on my td content, to manage top and bottom padding : Outlook 2010 and 2013 will ignore this and will use their own padding.

The text won't be perfectly aligned in Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 (slightly too far from top) but it works with all other email readers i tried : Apple Mail, Gmail, Outlook 2011 (yes..), Hotmail, Yahoo and many more.

Preview image : Outlook 2010 and 2013 preview

Preview image : Gmail, Apple Mail and others

In some cases we set border instead of padding and it works in outlook. 

border: solid #efeeee;border-width: 20px 40px;

Make sure to throw on the !important for Outlook especially. 

td {
border-collapse: separate;
padding: 15 !important
}

I also wanted borders, so might not work for someone who doesn't.

have you tried display:inline-block;?

My solution is to use an empty / whichever is needed with a transparent spacer gif since padding isnt 100% supported.

<td width="2" style="font-size:1px; line-height:1px;" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">                                                                                                       
   <img width="2" border="0" src="spacer50.gif" style="display:block; 
   padding:0; margin:0; border:none;" />                                                                                                
</td>

All styling including padding have to be added to a td not a span.

Another solution put the text into <p>text</p> and define margins, and that should give the required padding.

For example:

<p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10; margin-right: 12; margin-left: 12;">text</p>

I believe that we can use margin in <p> to provide space between the elements in Windows Outlook clients if we also use mso-line-height-rule:exactly; before line-height.

<p style="font-size:12px; mso-line-height-rule:exactly; line-height:1.00; margin:0 0 1em 0;">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi vestibulum nunc feugiat porta conseswctetur. Sedi dolor.</p>

<p style="font-size:12px; mso-line-height-rule:exactly; line-height:2.00; margin:0 0 2em 0;">Phasellus convallis, mauris ac vehicula posuere, ligula magna mattis ipsum, in sollicitudin nuddibh lacus eget sapien.</p>

<p style="font-size:12px; mso-line-height-rule:exactly; line-height:3.00; margin:0 0 4em 0;">Id semper sem pharetra vel. Sed ut erat auctor lectus pretium blandit gravida vitae enim. Nullam eget ex semeerst.</p>

Litmus Outlook 2016 (Win 7) Preview

Litmus Outlook 2019 (Win) Preview

Litmus Outlook 365 (Win)

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