If you’ve made it here, the chances are your Email Blast or News Digest is looking pretty strange in Outlook. You are not alone in this!

Cerkl’s system generates a set of HTML to be sent as the email. Most clients will read that HTML and display the way it looks in the previews in the Cerkl system. Outlook specifically can render things differently (spacing, padding, font sizes etc.). These symptoms are also different across versions of Outlook (newer versions, Mac vs PC, Web vs Standalone Application).

The reason why this is happening is because Microsoft uses legacy software for their products. They do this because they want their current products to be backwards compatible with everything they’ve made all the way back to the 90’s. This means that their software doesn’t play very nice with how the modern internet is built. An example of this is the different measurements assigned to font size: Cerkl Broadcast sizes fonts with pixels, as opposed to Microsoft, which sizes fonts with points. What this means is that numbers assigned to font sizes will vary from one application to the next, which can be confusing when you're designing communications. It is useful to remember that even though the numbers may vary, the actual size of the font remains the same.

Unfortunately, there is little to be done about these issues, as it's all controlled by how the different versions of Outlook interpret the HTML sent to them. We recommend looking at the preview in the editor and sending yourself samples, then making small changes to see if you can get the look you’re going for.

If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at support@cerkl.com or use the support Chat toward the bottom right-hand corner of any cerkl.com page.