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:

alt text

and my coworker saw this:

alt text

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>

Lawrence Dol

Posted 2010-11-15T22:40:38.177

Reputation: 1 946

One thing might help in identifying this issue is to compare the full headers for emails sent from Outlook to Thunderbird, and vice-versa. Outlook may be setting/expecting a header that Thunderbird does not normally set. Since these look to be HTML/RTF emails, something about the Content-type or encoding used might be useful in getting more information. – roguesys – 2010-11-15T23:35:06.820

Content-type for outgoing mail is set for UTF-8 in Thunderbird. These are newly composed emails, and not replies or forwards. – Lawrence Dol – 2010-11-15T23:41:48.123

I've added the email source, which shows such things as content type, encoding and TB versions. – Lawrence Dol – 2010-11-15T23:47:08.633

Answers

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.

Lawrence Dol

Posted 2010-11-15T22:40:38.177

Reputation: 1 946

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: &nbsp;</th>
    <td style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">%subject%</td>
  </tr>
</table>
<br />
<br />

Abel

Posted 2010-11-15T22:40:38.177

Reputation: 1 280

And now the link is broken. :( – Wildcard – 2017-10-29T14:49:53.417

@wildcard, it's too long ago to remember what I did here. But you may try Google or the web archive, copies may be available there. Feel free to update if you find something useful. – Abel – 2017-10-29T14:53:34.897

This is not at all what I am talking about. Look at the two screenshots and the complete mess that Outlook makes of the email sent from TB. In particular, you'll note that email sent by TB contains no styling information at all, but one received from Outlook is chock full of (crappy) styling and fonts. – Lawrence Dol – 2011-06-27T17:59:19.663

@Software: The thing is, in my experience, Outlook messes up the email because by default, parts of the message are rendered in a certain way by TB, and this "default" way is not known by Outlook. By giving yourself more control (i.e., adding stylesheets for default P, DIV, TD etc fonts and sizes, bulleted lists and removing the ">" in replies, which is what these plugins do) you can make a message look the same in Outlook and in Thunderbird. But it takes a bit of experimenting to reach that point. – Abel – 2011-06-28T08:26:27.417

@Abel: OK, fair enough; if you edit this into your answer as a clarification I'll be able to remove my downvote. – Lawrence Dol – 2011-06-29T00:25:16.007

@Software: I expanded and added a few of my own experience. In all fairness, it is still a pain, but once setup it works reasonably well. – Abel – 2011-06-29T08:25:22.900

@Abel: So, using SmartTemplate, which I already have installed, where would I put the styling information, and what would that look like - do you have an example that you've used successfully? – Lawrence Dol – 2011-06-29T21:48:24.837

@Soft: don't forget to read the tutorial I linked to, it gives some excellent info. I added an example, with a bit of tweaking you can get it as pretty as you like and closest to Outlook. I used a bit back and forward mailing with Outlook to get to a style that doesn't break in-between (and don't forget the QuoteAndComposeManager) – Abel – 2011-06-30T13:00:24.437

1@Abel: I am still not sure we are talking about the same thing. I am not wanting to get an Outlook-like header between messages on reply or forwarded email. I am looking for a way to stop Outlook from completely butchering the body of any email I send. – Lawrence Dol – 2011-07-01T05:16:49.070

@Soft: the problem is here two-fold: (1) Outlook uses another renderer, some things will always be different. (2) Outlook collapses your email by removing whitespace and adds classes of its own. You can only change some things of the second problem, and you can only do so by using inline styles, as far as I found out. But you cannot change the way a bullet looks, or indenting, unless you revert to tables (lot of work). With these templates you can get closer, but I don't think you can get all the way. But I'll have a wider look at things and see if something else can be done. – Abel – 2011-07-05T12:18:20.333

In addition: in your example you use body styles. Since after replying to a mail with <body> (and other document-wide tags) are replaced by Outlook's (and rightly so, or the sender on the other side could not use his styles), these styles will disappear. To prevent that, use inline styles. The best solution: wrap everything in a <div>, but unfortunately, when creating a new mail, TB does not put the cursor after the opening div, but before, which is a nuisance. However, to make Outlook vs TB work nicely together, wrapping in divs is the way to go, which can be done with the New-template. – Abel – 2011-07-05T12:22:20.330

An ideal solution would be to be able to influence inline styles for each tag TB uses, that way you avoid you will see the default styles of Firefox (TB) or Internet Explorer (OL) of tags like <tt>, <pre> differ. Note: this difference in default styles is unfortunately allowed by all HTML related standards to date. – Abel – 2011-07-05T12:25:40.030