Why does my Email look different in Outlook?

Email campaigns created with Closum are designed for optimised display in all Email clients. However, some display problems can occur in Outlook, where the content may not exactly match what appears in the editor.

In this article, we explain what the most common display problems are in Outlook and how to optimise your Emails to avoid them.

Why does my Email look different in Outlook?

You may have noticed that some of your Emails appear differently in Outlook compared to what you saw in the drag-and-drop editor. These display problems occur mainly in the 2003, 2007 and 2010 versions of Outlook, as they use Microsoft Word to process Emails, which offers limited support for HTML and CSS.

Other factors, such as the size of the screen or the spam filter used by the recipient, can also affect the display of the Email.

To check whether Outlook is the cause of this difference, try viewing the content and images in other Email clients, such as Gmail or Hotmail. If the Email is displayed correctly on these platforms, then the problem really lies with Outlook.

What are the common Email display problems in Outlook?

Not all recipients using Outlook will experience these display problems. In fact, some Outlook users in your contact list may never have received garbled Emails. However, it is advisable to test Email campaigns on several Email providers, including Outlook, before sending.

Margins around images are not displayed

All versions of Outlook (except Outlook.com) ignore the margins applied to images. As a result, there may be no space between the text and the image, even if margins have been added in the settings.

• Solution:

To avoid this problem, you can use an image editing program to add a border to the image in the same colour as the Email background before importing it. This way, the border will be part of the image and won't be ignored by Outlook.

Images are not displayed

By default, Outlook blocks images in Emails. To view them, recipients have two options:

• Unblock images manually for each Email received.

• Change the Outlook settings to allow images to be displayed automatically in all Emails.

As it is not possible to force the automatic display of images, we recommend:

• Set an alternative background colour if the background image is blocked.

• Importing images directly into the Email instead of using images hosted on a server, especially for older versions of Outlook which may not display them correctly.

Images appear truncated or resized

Outlook imposes a limit of 1728 pixels on the height of images. If an image exceeds this value, it may be truncated or resised.

Solutions:

• Reduce the height of the image to less than 1728 pixels before importing it
• If the image is too large, split it into two or more parts and add multiple image blocks to the Email

• Avoid resizing images only via the HTML code, as Outlook may ignore this change and display the image in its original size.

Font size and type are not displayed correctly

Outlook may display text in a different font or size to the one set in the email editor.

Solutions:

• Use standard system fonts such as Arial or Calibri instead of Google fonts, which can have inconsistent behaviour.

• If you need to use a Google font, always specify a replacement font in the code

Unwanted whitespace is added

Outlook can add unexpected whitespace to Emails because of the way it processes HTML through Microsoft Word.

Solution:

• Reorganise content to avoid unexpected page breaks

• Duplicate the Email before making changes to avoid losing content

The content seems wider than expected

Outlook can expand the content of the Email when a long URL is included as plain text.

Solution: Instead of inserting a full URL as text, turn it into a clickable link associated with a relevant word or phrase.

Updated on: 08/07/2025