emails appear too wide

[Jason.Davis.KC]

My site sends HTML Email... sometimes users complain that the emails
are too wide, causing them to have to scroll horizontally. I can't see
anything in the HTML that would cause it to do that, and it only
happens to some people (I think all who have this problem are using
Outlook).

The only thing that I've noticed is that I have a top-level table:

<table width="100%" ...>

and if I change it to a fixed width, the problem is solved, but then
other people complain that the email is too narrow. But 100% should
exactly fill the screen, not overfill it, so I don't know why that
would be a problem.

Someone else told me to look if there are a lot of nbsp's but I
checked and there aren't.

Any ideas on what I should look for?

 

[Roady [MVP]]

It also depends on what's inside the table what decides the width of it.
Like for instance a picture of a width of 800px.
Consider using css for formatting instead.

 

[Jason.Davis.KC]

I checked for pictures and none are very wide.

The annoying thing is that I can't fiddle with the HTML, removing
things one by one to see what fixes it, because I can't reproduce the
problem on my own machine.

How would switching to CSS help?

 

[Roady [MVP]]

With CSS you can also place sections in the proper places instead of by
using tables for layout.
It's a design choice you have to make. We cannot see what you have done and
how people have received it and what their configuration is. All you gave us
to work with was <table width="100%" ...>

Using CSS might be an alternative for you that does produce the anticipated
result.