Member Avatar for mmorton

Hi Guys!

I'm trying to make a very simple webpage template. One that I can send via email that will display correctly when the receiver opens the email. I've been having trouble getting the pages to display properly in Lotus Notes.

However, I received an email today that did display correctly in notes (see attachment). My question is, how did they do that? In the screen shot, you'll notice that there is a thick gray border around the actual newsletter. How did they do that? Any and all help would be very much appreciated!

Thanks!

Michael

NewsPic.jpg 48.05 KB
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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Kegtapper

Dani AI

Generated

— that thick gray frame is almost certainly just an outer table cell used as a background/border, not a fancy CSS border. Replies here pointed out HTML email and newsletter tools (, , ), but for reliable rendering in Lotus Notes and other clients the pragmatic approach is nested tables with legacy attributes (bgcolor, cellpadding, cellspacing) and inline styles only for text/typography.

A minimal, robust pattern that reproduces the gray "frame":

<table width="620" align="center" bgcolor="#cccccc" cellpadding="20" cellspacing="0" border="0">
  <tr>
    <td>
      <table width="580" bgcolor="#ffffff" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
        <tr>
          <td style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size:14px; color:#333333;">
            ...email content here...
          </td>
        </tr>
      </table>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

Why this works: the outer table's bgcolor gives the gray color and cellpadding controls thickness; the inner white table is the newsletter body. This avoids CSS layout rules Lotus Notes often ignores (margins, floats, complex selectors). Use fixed pixel widths, align="center", and inline styles for fonts. Send as multipart/alternative (plain-text + HTML) so recipients set to text-only do not see raw HTML. Test in the actual Notes client versions you expect; different Notes/Outlook versions render slightly differently.

If you use a generator or FrontPage (as mentioned), open the produced HTML and simplify it to this nested-table pattern before sending. Remove extraneous scripting, CSS in the head, and use absolute URLs for hosted images or embed images carefully — many clients block remote images by default.

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Member Avatar for zippee

I'm not quite sure your problem about "not display correctly".

The attached email is written in HTML rather than text version. Ideally you can buy a software or subscribe to online newsletter tools (email marketing to) to produce such a nice email.

If you know server side language, you can generate HTML email from your website by defining the content type and charset, and include all html tags within the sendmail script.

The problem within html email is some user have their email setting to read only text, and the nice newsletter will suddently become useless (user see all the html code).

Member Avatar for LinkWithUs

If you are hosted with a company that offers Cpanel W/Fantastico you can find some very useful newsletter generating scripts in there that will allow you to do what you are asking to be able to do. They are pretty self explanatory and should take minutes to setup and be on your way.

Member Avatar for Kegtapper

Hi Guys!

I'm trying to make a very simple webpage template. One that I can send via email that will display correctly when the receiver opens the email. I've been having trouble getting the pages to display properly in Lotus Notes.

However, I received an email today that did display correctly in notes (see attachment). My question is, how did they do that? In the screen shot, you'll notice that there is a thick gray border around the actual newsletter. How did they do that? Any and all help would be very much appreciated!

Thanks!

Michael

Use frontpage
Create a Webpage centered, Table in Table
Add graphics, add text
save as stationary.
Load Outlook
Choose Stationary. (the one you created)
Enter Address (always testsend to yourself first)


aka Kegtapper

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