[seer_tenedos]

Guys,
I currently have notification emails getting sent to many people. About half of these people have blackberries. The notification emails are multi part emails that contain both a text based and html based version of the message. The HTML version is really for the outlook users and the text based version was for other email clients that can not display the html email. This is working great for everything except the blackberries.

The blackberries are trying to display the html version by converting it to text and it is a mess. The html version has a heap of links at the start of the email and between the linsk and the html layout the text ends up all over the place and about 3-6 screens down on the blackberry. I was really hoping hte blackberry would have been smart enough to grab the text version of hte content in the email.

Is there any tags or properties i can insert into the email to force the blackbery to not use the html version of the email or a way to improve the content somehom on the blackberries?

Regards

Chris

[djm2]

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8830/4.2.2 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/104)

How do the emails display in BBSmart?

[Dubdub]

Have the users try either Empower or BBSmart.

[seer_tenedos]

Sorry i don't have a blackberry myself so i don't know the name of the applications etc.

As far as i know the users should be using the standard mail application and they using the blackberry gateway server or something liek that to move their exchange emails accross.

As to how they get displayed i can help with that.

Basically the notification on outlook looks very similar to this form page (the thread part) as the email is for notifications of new posts and contains the post's conent.

On the blackberry the issue is that it has 2 screens of links because it converts all the links at the top of the email to text and the links are very long. After that it will display the details on the user such as the name, when they joined etc and then finally it has the post title and post content. There are a few otehr things before the post title but you get the idea. It is not displaying the html or anything like that but because it is trying to strip the html out of the email the text that it ends up displaying is less than ideal. Thats why I wanted it to use the text version of the content.

Someone at my work told me the blackberry is defaulted to use the html version of emails over the text version and if that is the case I have no idea how to get around this issue as i cann't go and change all the blackberries.

Chris

[Dubdub]

BBs don't display HTML. Its text only, unless you have one of the add-ons such as Empower or BBSmart.

[seer_tenedos]

The blackberries are really out of my control. I have to try to make the emails look nice on them but I can not access or change the blackberries at all. On top of that the users are of all different IT skill levels so it is hard to say what they would have doen to them. On the up side most are high level managers so they should be mostly standard setups as generally high level managers don't know too much about computers.

[seer_tenedos]

your right it is not displaying html and thats why i assumed that if i gave it a plain/text part and a plain/html part it woudl displayt he plain/text part but the blackberry seems to choose the plain/html and try to work otu the text that makes it up.

[djm2]

From the way you describe it I really think it is in your best interest to get your hands on a BB and see how either BBSmart or Empower render the emails. The cost of these programs is quite minimal -- you would have freebie trials -- and it could solve most if not all of your problems, How many BBs are we talking about for the entire organization?

[seer_tenedos]

At a guess and from the stats I have been given by my client there are around 3000 BB's that would eb receiving the notifications at the minute and that would increase over time.

Like i have also said I can not get access to these BB's or make changes to them. I wish i could but that is not possible. My client is a large world wide company and in the scheme of things the website i am resposible for is not important enough to be able to justify a change to all the BB users.

ANy change to the BB is out. It has to be on my end. Is there a way to set something in the email so it is not sent to the BB but then send another email to the BB server that goes to the BB instead?

[rsnadel]

Have you considered eliminating the HTML from the message and just use text?

[djm2]

Originally Posted by rsnadel

Have you considered eliminating the HTML from the message and just use text?

Other more knowledgeable users may have a better solution, but this seems to offer the most promise at the least cost.

[seer_tenedos]

yes i have but my client will not allow that. 100% of users user outlook and the company wants nice lookign emails (you know what they are like). Out of those users that use outlook about 50% also have BB's linked tot he exchange server.

Thats why i put the plain/text part and the plain/html part in the email. I have tested we different setting and the mail clients will display either the text version or the html version depending on how they are setup. The only thing i don't get is why the BB that can only display text chooses the html version over the text version and then tries to conver the html version to text!!!! stupid stupid stupid!

ok got that out of my system. There has to be a way around this. It is bound to be a hack but there must be a way. Is there any html content the BB hides? is there a way i could put secret content in the html tha the BB will show but outlook will ignore and hide? There has to be some way i can have a custom display of hte email on the BB vs the html on outlook

[daphne]

As the others said, BB does not display html in emails unless you get a third party program like Empower or BBSmart. There is no way around it.

[seer_tenedos]

I am sorry i am not been clear. I don't want it to show HTML i want it to show plain text but it is currently showing the plain text in the html version of the email not the text of the plain text version of the email. If it showed the plain text version instead of converting the html content to a plain text email i would be happy.


eg html email something like this

link 1 link2 link3
date

author title
date body

comes out like

link1 link2 link3 date author date title body

where the title and body are on the 3-6th screen.

I have a text version of the same content like so that i want it to use

Title
author date
body

Does that make any sense?

[daphne]

Yes, that makes sense, but it doesn't work that way. If an email is sent in plain text, it will be displayed on the BlackBerry as plain text. If the email is sent in html, it will display the text version of the html.

[OrganicBerry]

I don't think there is any way to have the BB's default to the text version of your multi part email that the non-outlook users do.

The only solution I can think of is to create a list of all BB users (which is simple to do) and send them a text version ONLY....and send all other users in the company the multi part email so it will still display correctly for the non-outlook users.....and will still default to the html version for the desktop outlook users.

[djm2]

Originally Posted by OrganicBerry

I don't think there is any way to have the BB's default to the text version of your multi part email that the non-outlook users do.

The only solution I can think of is to create a list of all BB users (which is simple to do) and send them a text version ONLY....and send all other users in the company the multi part email so it will still display correctly for the non-outlook users.....and will still default to the html version for the desktop outlook users.

From the OP's perspective, my guess is that the problem with this solution is that the BB users also are on Outlook, so they would have to either: (a) give up pretty emails on Outlook, or (b) receive two copies of the email, one for Outlook (pretty) and one for BB (legible).

[JSanders]

Another solution would be for where the user signs up for these notifications to choose either plain text or html. Then the website would send the message accordingly, much like Delta or others do with their notifications.

[rambo47]

You simply can't fix this given your constraints. If you can't get BBSmart onto their Blackberrys or change the email format you send out, you're hosed. Blackberrys don't do HTML email natively. Game over.

[djm2]

At the risk of sounding like a toadie, JSanders opt-in solution is probably the best I have seen given the constraints. At least that way everyone knowns what they are getting. Opt-in would only be required for the BB users.