Re: HTML Formatted Email Blank

Earl Hood <earl@earlhood.com> · Sun, 05 May 2002 14:33:10 -0500

On May 4, 2002 at 11:04, "Sperry Russ" wrote:

> I am running a mailing list that is being archived at the mail archives ( htt
> p://www.mail-archive.com ).
> 
> When mail is archived there by Mhonarc the HTML messages composed with the Ca
> lypso email client are blank.  But if the messages are composed with Outlook 
> Express then they appear with all the background color and images.  Calypso u
> ses the html engine from Outlook Express to compose HTML formatted mail.
> 
> Any ideas on what might be causing this or would you know where to point me?

Well, here is part of the HTML of the message you specified at
www.mail-archive.com:

  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
  <HTML><HEAD>
  <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
  <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2715.400" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
  <BODY style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial" text=#000000 bgColor=#fff4f8>One more test f
  or 
  the archvies.&nbsp;&nbsp; Disregard</BODY></HTML>

  <BR>
  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
  <HTML><HEAD>
  <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
  <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2715.400" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>

You HTML is malformed.  You have two doctype/head sections.

When MHonArc is stripping out the doctype/head section during filtering
(to allow for legal inclusion into the message page document) the
first part above (The one with the "One more test ...") is deleted.

Therefore, the problem is not with MHonArc or www.mail-archive.com.
The reason you see the message as "okay" in your mail client is that
many HTML renders are very forgiving about malformed HTML.

So, either your signature for your message includes a <!doctype>...
that it should not, or Calypso is generating bad HTML.

--ewh