Email Client and Portal Issues

Email Portal Issues

aol.com

  • AOL WebMail ignores the </textarea> tag.

    If your campaign message includes a text area in a form, everything after the <textarea> tag (including the rest of your campaign message) is displayed as plain text, as if it were part of the text area. The form will not look or work as expected.

cs.com

  • Compuserve WebMail ignores the <form> tag.

    If your campaign message includes an inline form, the entire contents of the form (everything between the <form> and </form> tags) is ignored—it is not displayed.

eudoramail.com

  • When your recipient tries to submit a form in response to a campaign message sent to this domain, she sees a message about "Failed to open .../campaignrespondent."

  • If your recipient uses Netscape 4.7 (Windows or Macintosh) or Netscape 6.0 (Windows) to view a campaign message sent to this domain and clicks an unsubscribe or clickthrough link, she sees an error message stating that the URL could not be reached.

    She can copy the URL from the error message and paste it into the browser's Location text box to proceed.

    On the Macintosh, Netscape 6 doesn't include the URL in the error message. Your recipient can "click and hold" on the link until the pop-up menu appears, choose Copy Link To Clipboard, and then paste the URL into the browser's Location text box.

go.com

  • Occasionally, addresses at this domain are skipped during campaign launch.

hotmail.com

  • If your account is set up to include this feature, the campaign edit and launch sequences include an option to "Send referenced images and other media objects as part of message," but Hotmail shows the images and other objects as message attachments.

juno.com

  • Occasionally, addresses at this domain are skipped during campaign launch.

lycos.com

  • When your recipient tries to submit a form in response to a campaign sent to this domain, she sees the message "not found action."

my-deja.com

  • Occasionally, addresses at this domain are skipped during campaign launch.

  • When your recipient uses Netscape 6 to view a campaign message sent to this domain, the message is shown as an attachment to a blank message. If your recipient tries to view the attachment, she sees the message "Problem verifying your account, please try again later."

netscape.net

  • HTML forms sent to addresses at this domain are displayed as plain text, and cannot be submitted.

rediffmail.com

  • HTML forms sent to addresses at this domain are displayed as plain text, and cannot be submitted.

usa.net

  • When your recipient tries to submit a form in response to a campaign message sent to this domain, she sees the message "server very busy."

verizonmail.net

  • Campaign messages sent to this domain bounce.

yahoo.com

  • Yahoo and some other portals don't allow your HTML email messages to contain the names of certain Javascript functions. Instead, they replace those names with other strings...even if the names aren't actually invoking Javascript.

    Example: the sentence "Get your free evaluation copy today!" might become "Get your free reviewuation copy today!"

    Obviously, this can affect the text of your message, but it can also "break" images by changing the filename in the SRC attribute of the IMG tag.

    Example: <IMG SRC="pix/downloadeval.gif"> might be changed to <IMG SRC="pix/downloadreview.gif">, which would prevent the image from being displayed.

  • If your account is set up to include this feature, the campaign edit and launch sequences include an option to "Send referenced images and other media objects as part of message," but Yahoo's mail client shows the images and other objects as message attachments.

Email Client Issues

AOL

  • AOL support for Turkish, Russian, and Greek and for Baltic and Central European languages is incomplete. Some characters in the iso-8859-9, koi8-r, iso-8859-7, windows-1257, and iso-8859-2 character sets may be displayed incorrectly in the subject line and message text.

    See Language- and locale-related issues for information about specifying character sets in your HTML campaign message documents.

Outlook

  • Outlook 2003 doesn't show the "alt" text for images in HTML-format messages. If the ALT attribute is in an IMG tag that's surrounded by <A HREF="..."> and </A>, Outlook 2003 moves the ALT attribute into the A tag, where it is completely ignored.

    Consider using a TITLE attribute (instead of an ALT attribute) in your IMG tags.

  • If your form displays a document or another form to acknowledge submission of an HTML form embedded in your campaign message, recipients using Outlook on Windows XP may see a message that "The server is very busy" after submitting the embedded HTML form. Recipients may report that the form submission hasn't worked, but the form data is posted to the Oracle Responsys database if that's the specified response action.

    The Service Pack 1 update for Windows XP solved this problem. Unless you're sure your recipients have installed the service pack, though, you should not embed an HTML form in your campaign messages; instead, use linked forms.

    You can also send the HTML form as an attachment to your campaign message, but many users are reluctant to open email message attachments, so the form may not be viewed.

  • If your campaign redirects the recipient to a URL to acknowledge submission of an HTML form embedded in your campaign message, recipients using Outlook on Windows XP will see a blank page after submitting the embedded HTML form. Recipients may report that the form submission hasn't worked, but the form data is posted to the Oracle Responsys database if that's the specified response action.

    You can avoid the problem by using linked forms. If you really want to embed HTML forms in your messages, contact Customer Support regarding an optional feature.

    With this option enabled for your account, Oracle Responsys will detect that the HTML form is submitted from Windows XP and will attempt to display the correct page automatically; however, if the recipient has disabled Javascript, she will see a message inviting her to click on a link to the correct page.

    Important: This optional solution requires that the recipient has installed the Service Pack 1 update for Windows XP. Additionally, it also affects recipients submitting the HTML form from an Internet Explorer browser window on Windows XP. In other words, if they have Javascript disabled, they will see the message described above. Basically, you'll achieve the best results by using linked forms.

  • Campaigns that use the self-contained (Multipart/Related) message feature do not show Flash content.
  • In HTML-format campaign messages that use the self-contained message feature, Outlook displays the campaign message itself as an attachment.
  • In Multipart/Alternative (text and HTML) campaign messages that use the self-contained (Multipart/Related) message feature, Outlook displays the text version of the campaign message and presents the HTML version of the message as an attachment.

Outlook Express

  • If your campaign includes an HTML attachment, any hypertext links in your message show as plain text.

Lotus Notes

  • You should send only plain-text messages to recipients who use Lotus Notes R4.6.
  • You should not send self-contained (Multipart/Related) email messages to recipients who use Lotus Notes R5.

Eudora

  • On the Macintosh, Eudora left-justifies the footers in your HTML-format campaign messages.

  • On the Macintosh, Eudora 4.0 does not display the forms and images in your campaign messages.

Netscape Messenger

  • When a form is submitted by a recipient using Netscape Messenger 6, some of the data is encoded in UTF-8 format, which may look like "garbage" characters in the profile table.