Prevent "if there are problems with how this message is displayed" on Outlook 2013

Question

I send HTML report emails to customers, which display nicely on most email clients. When displayed in Outlook 2013, the following message is sometimes displayed:

if there are problems with how this message is displayed, click here to view it in a web browser.

I would like to get rid of this message. This post suggests removing all thead and tbody tags from the message (there aren't any in my HTML code) and replace inline CSS with embedded CSS, which I can't do because other mail clients have problems with non-inline CSS.

Are there any known ways to prevent this message from showing?

Loudermilk

You might need to post your code... – Tallahassee

Here is another suggestion which suggests to add <span style="padding: 0px;"></span> at the bottom of the HTML email body. – Familiarize

Answer 1

I found that by adding the following to the head section of the page, that the message is not displayed.

<meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document">

I learned this by saving a nearly blank word document as HTML and selectively removing bloat over and over until I narrowed it down to this. In my case, the email was being sent using TSQL in SQL Server 2008 R2 via the msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail function.

Staggs

I did all three things: got rid of any thead and tbody, added that "Word.Document" meta tag and added the <span style="padding: 0px;"></span> at the end of my HTML body. I don't know which actually worked, but now my sent emails don't trigger the Outlook 2013 warning anymore. – Familiarize

This solved my issue without having to remove thead and tbody tags from my markup. – Acreage

Answer 2

Thanks to @Uwe Keim (above) and his solution (from a page that doesn't exist anymore):

add

<span style="padding: 0px;"></span>

to the bottom of the email, right before the closing body tag. That's it. No need to get rid of all the deprecated stuff (that Mailchimp always adds)!

Arcadia