Custom Email Templates are Showing Distorted in Outlook Application
Sep 8, 2025
Administration
Okta Classic Engine
Okta Identity Engine
Overview
This article details an issue where Custom Email Templates are created and sent to the users but when they arrive in the Outlook application the email looks distorted.
Applies To
- Custom Email templates
- Outlook Application
Cause
The Outlook application renders emails differently than other email providers, causing them to appear a bit distorted when they arrive in the application.
From Outlook 2007 onwards, Microsoft stopped using Internet Explorer to render emails and instead opted to use Microsoft Word as its rendering engine with limited support for reading HTML and CSS.
There is no support for:
- HTML5 elements.
- CSS positioning properties (float, left, right, etc).
- CSS property margin.
- Videos or SWF elements.
- Javascript code.
- Webfonts (for example, Google Webfonts).
- Attribute padding in HTML tags (p, div and img).
- Attributes for merging cells in a table (colspan and rowspan);
- Transformation of some fields input into characters such as [], (), and others, distorting form elements.
- Abbreviated hexadecimal color and CSS declarations cannot be read.
Solution
The solution is to engage with a developer who may set up the code that will allow the email to arrive properly in the Outlook application or to engage with Microsoft support for assistance with this issue.
