Outlook 2007 ignoring CSS within an HTML email due to 2 semicolons (;;)

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:43:00 --0100

Getting HTML emails looking good in Outlook 2007, is a relentless task at the best of times, but this one really caught me out... The system I was debugging is used for creating and sending Email Marketing campaigns. When creating a campaign, the system allows you to pick a template, - which selects a CSS style sheet which gets embedded into a style tag at the top of the email. With one particular template, only around 10% of the styles appeared to be getting applied to the email - most of the email was just using the default styles. When investigating, I noticed that all the CSS up to a particular point in the file (about 10% of the way through) was being applied, and the rest was being ignored. This line caused the problem:


	color:#FF9835;;

All CSS after the double semicolon was ignored. The strange thing is, the CSS file validated successfully using the W3C validation service... Interesting feature...

- CSS

Outlook 2007 ignoring CSS within an HTML email due to 2 semicolons (;;)