Serious issues with final email not looking like it did when creating it

[DoyleH2]

So this issue keeps coming up, but the last email campaign I sent out to our entire contact list really made me mad and made our company look like we don't know what we're doing..

So I've always noticed slight differences in how a campaign email will look when I'm building it verses what it looks like when sent out. Normally small things like a header I had on one line turns to 2 lines, or slight differences in how the font itself will look.. But in this last email I had a body of text beside an image of our website homepage and everything looked fine in the builder section, it looked fine in the preview and when I sent a test email to myself like I always do.. So after I completed it and sent to our contacts, I get an immediate email from my boss asking what was wrong with the latest email campaign.. I go to look at it and the image I had placed in took up the width of the entire email and my body of text was on top of it and completely illegible. It's a complete mess and failure of a really important email campaign announcing our new website. So that's just great. I'm attaching pictures of the preview image and what the actual email looked like when sent out.

[William_A]

Hello @DoyleH2 ,

I performed a test send of your email, and it showed as expected on my end, without the image being stretched across the whole template.

What email program are you using to view it - e.g. Gmail, Outlook 2013, 2016, Office 365, Yahoo, etc.? Did this issue occur for the test sends you did prior to actually sending it out? Does the issue occur on any other email programs for you? Do you copy from an original / master template each time, or do you just copy the previous copy of the email each time you make one to send out?

[DoyleH2]

So we use Outlook 2013. As I stated in my original post: Prior to sending the campaign email, I sent a test email to my Outlook email, as well as my personal Gmail account and both looked fine. After confirming and sending the email out to our contacts, my boss, as well as a couple clients confirmed that it indeed looked completely different from my original. Some of the emails had text overlapping an image and was completely illegible and one I saw had the text beside the image like my original but had all kinds of issues. Text was the wrong size, spacing was completely random..

When I create a new campaign, sometimes I'll use a previous email as a template and sometimes I'll start fresh. I believe for this one I used a previous email as my template.

[William_A · Accepted solution]

Thank you for providing that info, and I apologize for missing the earlier bit about you testing beforehand. After speaking with the higher level technical team, it seems this is an issue that can sporadically happen with Outlook 2013, however data they've collected have shown that this can be sometimes resolved by tweaking O13's display settings. 

• Change the following setting: View tab > Reading Pane > Options.
• Uncheck "Turn on automatic full-screen reading in portrait orientation"
• Restart Outlook and send a new test email

If that doesn't help, you can also try:

• File > Options > Mail > Message Format:
• Reduce message size by removing format information not necessary to display the message

If that doesn't work, the only other workaround that they can suggest is to include a view as a webpage link for those who are not seeing the proper look of the email.

See also:

Display Issues blog post

Images Not Displaying in an Email Client