White Lines Outlook

What is the bug?

If you’re using blocks of colour in your emails, you may have noticed that sometimes a line will appear across your email when viewing it in Outlook 2016. 

This is a known Microsoft bug, specific to Outlook 2016, which randomly occurs when you have a coloured element on top of a different coloured background. In this article, we’ll give you a bit more detail about the issue, and provide a couple of tips on things you could try in order to avoid it occurring.

 

The bug causes one pixel-width, horizontal lines to appear, which are the same colour as the email background. Sometimes they stretch across the width, and sometimes they only affect certain columns or areas of the email. 

What causes it?

Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any set rules on when the issue occurs, so it’s very difficult to resolve for all cases. It seems to be caused by the height of various elements in the email, and how they all fit into place.

 

It will only be visible where the email background differs in colour to other elements of the email. It’s more likely to occur where there are larger areas of coloured elements, and in more complex email designs. However, it tends to change on an email-to-email basis.

 

By zooming in and out in your browser, you’ll see that the positioning of the lines can change. Sometimes, if there are no lines to start with, by zooming in or out within Outlook, they can start to appear.

What can you do to fix it?

Because the bug seems to be to do with the height of the various elements, you can try to change the composition of the email. By taking a trial and error approach, you can see how the positioning of the line changes, and you might find a combination which removes it entirely.

Here’s what you can try within the platform itself:

 

• Change how text is split between snippets. If you have lots of snippets with text in them, try combining the text into a single snippet, or fewer snippets.
• Move elements out of snippets, and add into others. By moving the elements around in the email, you might change where the rogue lines fall.
• Try out a longer, or shorter version of the email.
• See how different colour variations affect how the email displays.
• Use images, which are not affected by the issue, to break up the email and change the composition.

 

Before investing too much in finding a fix, it’s worth exploring the impact of the issue. Use the Vuture Email Devices dashboard to find out how many of your contacts tend to open your emails using Outlook. If the number is very small, you might decide to de-prioritise the issue. If it’s very high, it might be worth putting a bit more resource into finding a fix for each email you send.

The Vuture team is very happy to help by manipulating the code of the email, but it would be chargeable work, and there is no guarantee that the issue won’t pop up again for your next email.We’re hoping that Microsoft will find a fix for the next version of Outlook.

Below, there are a couple of external resources which might help:

https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-development/how-do-i-get-rid-of-the-lines-in-outlook-emails/ 

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/1f4f1e03-8ad5-4079-bc18-8fcaaa7b785d/outlook-2016-renders-horizontal-lines-seemingly-randomly-in-html-emails?forum=Office2016ITPro