Notification email body blank in Outlook desktop but normal in Outlook 365

[Donzel]

From about 12noon today GMT, any notification sent from Shopify appears to have the email body missing when viewed from Outlook on the desktop version. However when viewing Outlook in 365 web version the email body is normal and visible.

Our customers are noticing this too. Does anyone else know of or have experienced this issue?

James

[TEPred]

I'm not sure who just went and marked this issue Solved, but merging topics and making dev aware of this problem is NOT a resolution by any means.

[Billy00]

We are experiencing the same issue as well. Shopify support pointed their fingers at Outlook. Our only solution for now is to log into our email via browser. 

[Donzel]

Shopify went ahead and marked it as solved themselves, which I didn't appreciate either, considering I posted the topic in the first place.

[NeuralBalance]

This worked for me and it took less than two minutes.  Thank you, @John244 

[Trevor]

Thanks for your feedback @NeuralBalance, @TEPred, @Donzel. 

We apologize for the confusion. The reason we marked this as the solution is to indicate the current status of the situation.

The solution feature allows other community member to quickly see the current status. We will update the thread with new information as it becomes available. 

[Bjorn_Forsberg_]

Hey Shopify,

This looks like a change in the charset encoding that Shopify uses when generating and sending notification emails. In the past Shopify has always used "UTF-8" to encode emails, however they are now being generated in "iso-8859-1" which looks to mess things up.

I know Shopify runs emails through PreMailer to inline styles before sending them, and I believe this is where a change happened, causing the output encoding to be wrong:

BEFORE

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Mime-Version: 1.0

TODAY

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Mime-Version: 1.0

You can see this in Apple Mail for example by:

1. Selecting the email so you are previewing it in Apple Mail

2. Clicking "View" in top menu

3. Select "Message" and then "Raw source"

You can then look for the Mime information (both a text/plain and text/html are included, html is what we are looking at)

Hopefully this is cleared up soon on Shopify's side, because it's definitely a change there and not on Outlook. It can be visible in Outlook because they aren't as good at cleaning up broken code as other email clients.

Thanks!

Bjorn

[TEPred]

@Bjorn_Forsberg_  Not to disagree with you, but the current emails being received from our Contact Form show: content=text/html; charset=utf-8 as do the past ones which rendered properly... the encoding has not changed at all.

I will however agree with one point you've made, Outlook is far less tolerant of sloppily written code than many other email clients.  But I wouldn't fault an application for enforcing correct code.

[Bjorn_Forsberg_]

Are you looking at the MIME headers, or the HTML email code? I don't have a copy of the Contact Form email specifically, but I do have all the other email notifications sent by Shopify.

[TEPred]

The html code of the email content, because that's where the problem with the character entity references exists.  Simply removing the references to &lt & &gt, replacing them with the correct less than and greater than symbols and embedding the html into a new email renders the content fine in Outlook desktop, problem solved.  Emails prior to yesterday morning were coded this way, since then the character references were injected (probably by mistake) and now it does not render the content even though it still exists in the html body.

The login notification emails have the exact same issue in the html head section as well...

[Bjorn_Forsberg_]

Yep, we are really talking about the same thing in the end 🙂

What I understand is that changing the encoding, can/will also change the output html of the email. So what used by be rendered as "<" now renders as "&lt;".. it's the same character (less than) but now no longer does what it's supposed to in the email code.

So long story short, Shopify emails are currently being generated with incorrect characters, which I believe is due to an encoding change on their end.

[TEPred]

Agreed.  Outlook believes you are attempting to represent the character, rather than surrounding html code with it, due to the reference being used rather than the symbol.  My guess is that when it hits that point, it just ceases.  If you take one of these emails and save it as a PDF, that line of code actually appears in the PDF as text along with the body content, which it should not do, obviously, if it was being treated as code.

[Bjorn_Forsberg_]

Yeah, I think you are right! I really wish Outlook would use a browser engine as it's renderer.. it uses Word's html renderer under the hood, which holds email coding in the dark ages and creates unnecessary issues like this. It also explains why the emails work when opened in browser vs in the Outlook app itself.

Let's hope they find a solution soon 🙂

[TEPred]

Agreed as well.  I have no idea why they felt the need to change anything.  There are so many businesses, from small to enterprise level, that rely upon Outlook as their client.  And with so many of us doing B2B, it has a far reaching impact.

[andrew_luden]

We're seeing the same issue with email generated via the Contact Us form. They render as blank in the Outlook Desktop Client but if the source is viewed we can confirm the message contents are present. If view using the Outlook Web Client the messages render correctly. 

Any updates on a fix Shopify?

[Sandib]

Same - desktop issues but ok online version.

[NeuralBalance]

My Contact Us form has been working and we have not made any changes.  This morning I noticed that the emails we received from the Contact Us form were completely blank.  I went to the form and filled out a test message and submitted it.  I immediately received the email but when I opened it, it is completely blank. No name, no email, no message.

I'm finding other conversations regarding not receiving the email at all but I'm not finding anything regarding receiving blank emails.  Is this happening to anyone else? Any ideas what's wrong? @Shopify 

[luisgomes]

We are experiencing the same since this morning. 

Any news on this?

[John244]

Also having the same problem.  My work around is to Set my Outlook to read all messages as plain text.  I can at least read the messages now.  You can switch individual emails back to HTML by selecting We converted this message into plain text format in the reading pane

• Click the File tab.

• Click Options.

• Click Trust Center, and then click Trust Center Settings. 

• Click Email Security.

• Under Read as Plain Text, select the Read all standard mail in plain text check box.

[NeuralBalance]

This.  This did it for me.  Thank you.

[cbardy]

I am having a similar issue as Will, however, mine just started today. Actually, I only have one that has a blank body. I often get "Contact Us" inquiries and this is the first time it is blank. So I tested it myself and went through "Contact Us" on my site and it too came into my email with a blank body. I am assuming the first one was not spam.

Any help?

[cbardy]

Thanks for the attempt, but your possible solution did not fix my issue.

[Red2]

Same issue is occuring for client stores.  Blank message body, including when complete tests.  I don't think this is just an Outlook issue.  Myself nor my clients use outlook.  Have reported to Shopify.

[GeoffH]

Having just been on the web chat to Shopify support it would appear that this is an issue that many customers are experiencing. It would appear that around 20 to 24 hours ago changes were made to the HTML formatting of the body of the contact us form emails. Whilst we see a blank body in outlook we can see the content in web mail and on the blank outlook emails if we right click view HTML save the HTML and view in a web browser then the content renders correctly. I'm not sure what change they have made but it is clearly not following some HTML rules and it is luck if the mail client is managing to render the content in a useful way. On the plus side the tech people are aware of the issue and are working on fixing it.

[SimonRodemann]

The problem seems to be related to the defined Outlook-specific styles.

Since yesterday, the resulting HTML looks like this: (the angle brackets appear as "&gt" and "&lt")

<!-- Styles specific to Outlook 2007, 2010 and 2013 -->
<!--[if gte mso 9]&gt;
&lt;style&gt;
ul,
ol {
margin: 0 0 0 24px;
}

dd {
text-indent: -3em;
}
&lt;/style&gt;
&lt;![endif]-->
<style data-premailer="ignore">
.apple-link a {
color: inherit !important;
text-decoration: none !important;
}

---

[cw-moss]

Is anyone having issues with emails coming from mailer@shopify.com in the Outlook desktop app? Starting yesterday, the Outlook desktop app itself is not rendering the email (there is a subject line, but nothing displays in the body of the email). I did call Shopify support. Developers are aware of the problem. Their suggested workaround was to use Outlook in a browser. Emails text displays properly in the browser version, but I am hoping for the fix with the desktop app. Any suggestions? I tried creating new PST file, etc. Nothing is working. 

[arrowmarketing]

Hello,

My emails coming from mailer@shopify.com have no text or attachments in the body.

Tried exporting orders, email only had a subject line

[Sghanam]

Hello every one i'm having issue with my email the export email is blank also the store owner is in Cc and she received the normal email with the attached link
can anyone help? 

[NicksWeb]

We and many others have the same issue.
The text body seems to be empty when opened in outlook desktop.
When the emails are send to for example, a gmail account, everything is readable.
Hope they will fix the issue asap.

[TarynS]

We're experiencing the same issue as well. Looking forward to an update or resolution! If anyone hears anything, please share. For now, we've rerouted our forms to a gmail inbox and it's working until this gets sorted. 

[RebeccaR]

Hi All,

It looks like Shopify may have fixed this issue. I just received an email correctly from Shopify.

Thanks

Rebecca R

[TEPred]

Confirmed, at least for the Contact Form submissions.  The character entity references we have been discussing are no longer present and the email renders correctly in Outlook desktop here now. 

[Bjorn_Forsberg_]

Seeing the same fix working in the Shopify order notification emails as well (Order confirmation, Shipping confirmation etc.). Our custom OrderlyEmails designs rendering correctly again, so looks like I can call it a day 🙂

[JasonH · Accepted solution]

This issue is resolved now for new emails going forward, so we've updated the solution in this topic.

Thank you for your patience and understanding!

[ParagonIT]

Yes, it is working with new emails coming in.

Thank you

[TEPred]

@Bjorn_Forsberg_Thanks for your contribution to this thread and helping to support and identify this issue so it could get resolved.  Appreciate it greatly!

[Bjorn_Forsberg_]

Thank you @TEPred, appreciate your input as well!