Features / Usability

Posted by Peter 04 May 2005 09:57 GMT-0000 posts: 49

Been pulling my hair out for hours trying to figure this out; decided to try searching forum (will someone with admin please enable full text search on this site???). Came across this post that sounds much like my problem. Doubt anyone still watching this post but maybe Sylvie is still keeping an eye on it.

I have authored a very lovely, very html rich newsletter. Thought it would be very cool to use TW to send this as an email (ala TW Newsletter). But my email seems to be getting corrupted in numerous very confusing manners. Like I said I have run about 50 tests so far and results are a bit sporadic… so just a few of the results:

- the html file I am trying to use as content for my newsletter can be seen (perfectly I might add) I a browser at http://www.ottawavolleyball.com/newsletters/nl_0505.htm

- nl preview almost always looks correct – but not always (can’t handle background style color setting for example – but no big deal)
- I am using a few different mail programs and different mail servers
o mozilla mail, Outlook, and webmail
o my ISP mail account and the mail server that run myself

- basic issue is that when I look at the email – it is messed up
- looking at the html source that my email program spits out I see 3 basic types of corruption:
o characters being lost (ex. link to gif is http://domain/ball.gif and it ends up as http://domain/bll.gif)
? this of course shows up when viewing the email as a missing graphic
o characters are being inserted
? the “=??? character is being thrown in all a lot ; and sometimes the character string “3D??? – which amazingly enough is ASCII for .. you guessed it – the “=??? character
? this of course has a similar effect to characters being lost

the REALLY messed up part of this problem is what is consistent and what isn’t:

- my ISP mail account generally works better
- errors are repeatable – sending same email over and over will always same corruption
- that corruption is mostly repeatable between Outlook and Mozilla – but not completely

Like I said I have far more details test results – but I figure if someone knows the answer to my problem – they likely already know it from what I have reported so far.

My final test was to simply scrap the whole formatted html newsletter idea and just send a text email giving link to see html nl in browser. My simple one liner with a link also get corrupted but only when going through my email server (my ISPs works fine).

Any thoughts would really save me a lot of hair…

cheers,
peter….