HTML email: Same code, different results

[cschults]

Ok, I'm stumped. Grist Magazine launched HTML emails on April 4th. Everything has been okay until today. When I sent today's Weekly Grist (http://www.grist.org/email/weekly/2005/04/26/), the majority of the email became italicized in Outlook, Entourage and Thunderbird. The same email in Yahoo! mail and AOL Webmail was fine.

During my investigation, I discovered that Outlook et all moved an <em> tag like so ...

from:

<font size="1" face="verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif" color="#000000"><span style="font-size: 12px"><strong>Iceland, Iceland, Baby</strong><br />
<a href="http://grist.org/i-refer?source=weekly" style="color: #336699; font-family: verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-decoration: underline;">Introduce your friends and family to <em>Grist</em> emails</a> and we might just thank you by sending you to Iceland.
</span></font><br /><br />

to:

<font size="1" face="verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif" color="#000000"><span style="font-size: 12px"><strong>Iceland, Iceland, Baby</strong><br />
<a href="http://grist.org/i-refer?source=weekly" style="color: #336699; font-family: verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-decoration: underline;"></em>Introduce your friends and family to <em>Grist emails</a> and we might just thank you by sending you to Iceland.
</span></font><br /><br />

Why did this happen?!? And get this ... Yesterday's Daily Grist (http://www.grist.org/email/daily/2005/04/25/) was fine. I resent it today to a test mailing list -- same problem!

We're currently using Sympa to deploy emails, but our host says no changes have been made for some time.

I did discover that moving <em> and <strong> tags outside <a> tags solved the problem, but again ... this was not necessary for the past two weeks.

Anyone have any idea why this is happening?

Thanks in advance!!!

[Fang]

Sounds like a patch has been applied, ask Sympa.
Have you tried replacing <em> with <i> or <span style="font-style: italic;"> ?

[cschults]

According to our host, no manual or automatic patches have been applied.

Same thing happens with <i> tags. Haven't tried using another <span>, but I would prefer not to do this.

Again, I found a solution (moving the formatting tags outside the <a> tags), but the mystery to me is why everything was working fine until yesterday, and why the emails are still fine in Yahoo! mail and AOL Webmail???

Any other suggestions/thoughts?

[cschults]

I'm happy to report that HTML standards haven't changed here in Seattle.

While our email list management software didn't change, a feature on our email server did. Apparently, the weirdness that I described above only effected internal emails.

Thanks for listening.