Can Thunderbird and MS Outlook be made to play nice together
I have had a long-term ongoing battle in having nicely formatted emails sent in Thunderbird totally destroyed by MS Outlook. Are there any settings in either program which can resolve disagreements in layout and font selection?
By way of example, as a test I sent this:
and my coworker saw this:
The full source of the email sent is this:
From - Mon Nov 15 13:58:11 2010
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00800000
X-Mozilla-Keys:
Message-ID: <4CE1ACF1.2060804@***redacted***>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:58:09 -0800
From: ***redacted***
Organization: ***redacted***
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101027 Thunderbird/3.1.6
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: ***redacted***
Subject: Font used in email from me
X-Priority: 5 (Lowest)
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<span id="IDstID">***redacted***,<br>
<br>
Could you please email me the screen shot of this email so I can
see it as it appears to you, just big enough to include all the
text vertically, and to cause wrapping horizontally.<br>
<br>
Indented paragraph:<br>
</span>
<blockquote>Sans-serif variable pitch font, indented.<br>
</blockquote>
A List:<br>
<ul>
<li>Bullet One</li>
<li>Bullet Two</li>
</ul>
Preformatted:<br>
<blockquote>
<pre>Fixed pitch preformat text indented. <tt>Blah,</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt></pre>
</blockquote>
Fixed Pitch, Flowing:<br>
<blockquote><tt>Fixed pitch flowing text, indented. Blah,</tt><tt>
blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt>
blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt>
blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt>
blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt>
blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt>
blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt>
blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt>
blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt>
blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt>
blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt><tt> blah</tt></blockquote>
<span id="IDstID">-- <br>
***redacted***<br>
***redacted***<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.***redacted***.com">http://www.***redacted***.com</a><br>
</span>
</body>
</html>
This helped for me:
Using two plugins, SmartTemplate (or SmartTemplate4 for TB 4+) and QuoteAndComposeManager, you can fine-tune the templates Thunderbird uses whether creating new mails, replies or forwards. A full rundown on how to change the Thunderbird messages to look like outlook-style can be found at the blog Be excellent to each other: How to Setup Replies in Thunderbird like Outlook.
Note: you'll need to do some tweaking and trying before it really works. I.e., when you don't use an inline style for a <td> element, it will render ugly on Outlook and on a returned mail (usually from Arial to Times). It's also recommended that you wrap the templates in a <font> block, because the Thunderbird editor will automatically place the cursor after the font-tag, but not after a div-tag (if that's the first tag in your template).
Information on other template uses and add-ins can be found here at Mozillazine, I haven't tried them, however.
As an example, here's what I've put in the Reply template, tweak it to your liking, the redundant span/font tags are to keep TB happy. It's still not perfect, but closest it can get for now, I think:
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" size="3"><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> <br />
<br>
Cheers, <br />
<br>
Abel Braaksma
</span>
</font>
<br />
<br />
<hr style="height:1px;border:none;color:black;background-color:black" />
<table style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<th align="left" style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">From:</th>
<td style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">%from%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th align="left" style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sent:</th>
<td style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">%datelocal%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th align="left" style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To:</th>
<td style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">%to(name)%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th align="left" style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cc:</th>
<td style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">%cc(name)%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th align="left" style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Subject: </th>
<td style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">%subject%</td>
</tr>
</table>
<br />
<br />
As it turns out, there is a relatively simple solution to this.
Never use "Body Text" for your email's top-level body, always use "Paragraph". I use the SmartTemplate4 add-on, so I set up templates along the line of:
<p>...</p>
<p>-- </br>
<b>Lawrence Dol</b></br>
http://SoftwareMonkey.org</p>
The leading elipses was necessary to stop Thunderbird throwing away the (otherwise) empty paragraph.
So when I start an email, I just highlight and overwrite the ellipses and it starts off in paragraph mode right away. (All other methods I could find to make TB use paragraph mode by default failed, though they undoubtedly worked for some people for at least some TB versions.)
What I like about this solution most is that it requires no CSS hacks; my email, as sent, is beautiful, plain, unadorned HTML.
Update 2015:
As it turns out, while doing this retains the proper inter-block vertical spacing, there's no way to stop Outlook's worthless email editor from imposing it's own font styling, including forcing the thread to a serif font, and messing up styles.
A user style sheet can be used to force the display to be OK, but these can't be applied to the Thunderbird email editor, so you still see ugly fonts when replying to an email that came from Outlook.
I suppose it's too much to hope that the Outlook client will simply die.