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hi gang,

I've been having an intermittent problem with getting dakka post emails to render correctly in gmail. this has been going on as long as I can remember. here's a screenshot of what I'm talking about:

http://screencast.com/t/YqhyVV8IK3qm

the top message has markup in it, but isn't being parsed as markup for whatever odd reason. the bottom email also seems to have markup in it (I'm basing that off the multi-color text I see), but renders just fine. I haven't noticed any rhyme or reason as to why one email renders ok and another doesn't. I'm using gmail. is this an issue with the emails or a problem with gmail? any way I can fix it?

cheers,

v

Noted and thanks for the example. Will investigate, though I appreciate it has been this way for many many moons now.

cool, let me know if I can pass on any more info

The issue with rendering html emails comes down to how the forum software is configured to send emails. The messages that are not being rendered properly as HTML emails are missing some headers that allow email readers to properly render them.

When I look at a properly rendered email, it has the following headers which are missing from ones that are just code:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

The first one is important, this is what tells your email reader how to parse the message.

Happy to look at the code and determine what's missing, if anyone wants to let me peek at the forum software.

The mail sending system is just hacks on hacks at the moment. We switched to a new mail server about 9 months ago and since then I've been intending to rewrite that whole mess of code to trim out these sorts of errors and add more useful functionality.