Shaw Webmail (Zimbra) is breaking email formatting

[dcmbrown]

I noticed that a large number of emails lately have been broken by Shaw's Webmail system Zimbra.  It's been doing this for one to two months and affects all new and already received emails in both the desktop and mobile views in webmail.  Take for example this LinkedIn job alert email:

Partway into the email the formatting is already screwed up.  It is not the email itself which is broken because when I forward this email somewhere else (like a  gmail account) it shows up fine like so:

It appears that in reformatting html emails (which is just about any email from anything from online stores to job sites, etc etc) for viewing within the webmail system Zimbra has huge problems with emails which have nested tables for formatting. 

Good examples (easy to setup an account and duplicate) of emails which get messed up by this are LinkedIn job alerts, Pinterest "N of your pins have been saved", Twitter alerts from deemed interesting posts from people you follow.

Hopefully a Shaw support rep will notice this and forward this on to someone or comment if it is already being looked into.

[mdk]

Which Operating System are you using? Mac OS? Windows 8? Windows 10?

Which web-browser? Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer Beta, Microsoft Edge, the January-2020 "new" version of Microsoft Edge?

Also, what is your screen-resolution? 800-by-600? 1024-by-768? 1280-by-1024? 1440-by-800? 1920-by-1024?

Have you reset the browser's "zoom" to any value other than 100% ?  (Try CTRL-zero, or CTRL-minus, or CTRL-plus, to change the zoom-level.)

Browser's default font-size? 8? 10? 12? 14? 16?

[dcmbrown]

Sorry, this isn't a browser display issue. The original email content (via Show Original action) has zero mention of zimbra in it.  Most html emails are a series of nested tables but Shaw Webmail has started with some emails either translating these into span elements or inserting span elements around the inner nested tables on some emails for some reason.  I'm sure there's a bug report for it in zimbra and possibly a fix as well.  I'll track it down and post the fix for Shaw or at least the report sometime this weekend if I remember.

Oh and incidentally:

• both the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, and Chrome for Android
• at 1280x1024, 1920x1024, and 1080x2240 (phone), 2560x1600 (Mac)
• Windows 10, Mac OS (10.15), and Android
• at all zoom and font size levels

[cbss]

Has this issue been resolved?  I started to receive emails that, when I try to reply, there is extra paragraph formatting which is a recent event.  If there is a solution, would someone please post it?  Thank you. 

[dcmbrown]

Nope it sure has not.  I'm gradually just moving all of my email over to gmail as a solution instead.

[cbss]

Wow that is sure sad to know that Shaw cannot handle this one.  I am about to move my emails also but not sure to which program.  Good luck with your gmail - I just am leery of Google and how much control is already has over my life........lol:)   Have a great day and thank you for answering my enquiry. 

[shaw-tony]

@cbss @dcmbrown that's very odd. I don't see any formatting issues with my webmail account. Are your preferences set to HTML or AJAX? If it's HTML, please change it back to AJAX through your preferences.

[dcmbrown]

wfm has never been an industry accepted solution as a response to clients.  The whole AJAX vs HTML is bunk because it occurs under both.  For more reference: Pinterest changed their formatting recently with their "Today's top trending ideas!" emails which results in this interesting formatting.

While slightly more asthetically pleasing than the usual format killing the overlapping does not occur in the message normally so I can only assume these inserted spans (see below) are conflicting with a style somewhere along the lines and causing this issue. There's really no reason at all for Shaw to be tracking links so it would be great if they could turn this off.