[ZendTo] An update for HTML email templates and body tag

[Jules Field]

On 17/01/2019 16:57, Travis Zimmerman via ZendTo wrote:
> We encountered a weird problem that only occurs when forwarding or 
> replying to emails from ZendTo using Thunderbird. The background color 
> from body defined in local.css would get applied to the message from 
> the person forwarding or replying. At my university that means the 
> background was set to a dark garnet, which makes black text hard to 
> read. So this sent me down a whole rabbit hole of looking at the HTML 
> email templates, which brings up two changes that I think would be 
> great for ZendTo.
>
> 1) Set the body tag in the website code (header.tpl) and emails 
> (email_header_html.tpl) to have id=“zendtobody” or whatever you would 
> like to name the id for the body css. It would mean local.css needs a 
> minor change from body to #zendtobody. All around I think a pretty 
> easy minor change that clears up the weird Thunderbird interaction.
I can do that, no problem.

>
> 2) I’ve attached some edits I made to email_header_html.tpl and 
> email_footer_html.tpl. My uni’s gold logo looked a bit off on the grey 
> background so I changed it to match the garnet we use on the website, 
> which is when I realized that the email style was set manually instead 
> of using the local.css that it imports and that the rounded corners 
> were images. So I made changes to the templates to use fully use the 
> local.css branding and I converted one of the tables into divs and set 
> the content div (#container) to have rounded corners without using 
> images. Let me know what you think, I think I managed to keep the 
> design you created but made it to automatically use the branding we 
> define in the local.css. I only had my uni logo and the default ZendTo 
> logo to test against, so I didn’t get to do an extensive amount of 
> testing.
Sadly, a lot of mail clients (hi, Outlook for starters!) display HTML 
*very* poorly. Believe it or not, Outlook uses Word's HTML renderer, 
rather than a web browser's one. If you try hard enough, you can get 
Outlook to draw page breaks in an HTML email. I *wish* I could have done 
the email styling with nice rounded corners and everything.

It took me a long time to produce a version that would render in every 
email app and webmail service I tried. I hate and detest that I had to 
do it with a table of nasty little images embedded with data: URLs, but 
that's the only way to do it. Had it been possible to do it the same way 
I did with the web pages, it would have saved me days figuring it out.

>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Travis Zimmermantzimmerman at fsu.edu <mailto:tzimmerman at fsu.edu>850-645-8030
> Linux Enterprise Applications & Systemsits-linuxadmins at fsu.edu 
> <mailto:its-linuxadmins at fsu.edu>
> Information Technology Services, Florida State University
>
>
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> ZendTo at zend.to
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Jules

-- 
Julian Field MEng CEng CITP MBCS MIEEE MACM

'There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world;
  and that is an idea whose time has come.'

www.Zend.To
Twitter: @JulesFM

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