Issue
In emails that appear to be correctly formatted, some recipients see spaces in the body of the email message. The message appears appropriately in the template builder and campaign setup, but some, not all, users report seeing spaces in the middle of the content.
For example
Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?
It ends up appearing as
Baa baa bla ck sheep, have y ou any wool?
Reason
There are several contributing factors to how this can happen. While there have been many efforts within the tech industry to normalize how email HTML is interpreted, there can still be outliers. Although HTML is a standard that is recognized everywhere, how Outlook interprets HTML can be different from Gmail. How a mobile device interprets an email can be different from a desktop.
Even different versions of Outlook can also interpret and display emails differently.
In most cases, the cause of this issue is extra HTML tags, especially formatting tags that are back to back-from each other. This can occur, for example, from pasting from outside resources or making changes and edits to a template over time.
Sample of HTML due to multiple edits and copying and pasting:
<strong>Baa baa bla</strong><strong>ck </strong><strong>sheep, have y</strong><strong>ou any wool?</strong>
Sample of HTML when optimized:
<strong>Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?</strong>
Most email applications will not have an issue displaying formatting. However, a combination of device and email application can lead to a problem with how the email appears.
Solution
Before presenting methods to work around this issue, the root cause is the overall issue of HTML interpretation by each email application and how it displays formatting. A combination of device and email applications can lead to this issue with how the email appears, and a change of email application can often lead to different results.
There are a few preventive steps that customers are encouraged to use to help lessen the probability of this issue.
Paste information into a plain text editor before adding to ContactMonkey
One is to ensure you copy from and only paste plain, unformatted text into the ContactMonkey editor. Then, format it within the editor afterward. This would involve pasting your text into an intermediary tool like Windows Notepad, or Mac Text Edit (in plain text mode), copying it, and then pasting it into the ContactMonkey editor.
Mac users can also paste data using Shift + Command (⌘) + V to paste without formatting.
Customers can then apply formatting within the ContactMonkey template editor.
Utilize ContactMonkey's text format removal function
Another is pasting the text within the ContactMonkey template/email editor and removing all formatting before bolding it.
- Within the ContactMonkey editor, select the text which is causing an issue
- Click on the Remove Formatting button to clear out all formatting that may be present
- Select the area and reapply the formatting from within the ContactMonkey editor (in this example, re-bold the text)