Hidden Formatting in Email Becomes Visible on Reply?

[Stephanie_Berr2]

We sent out a newsletter to our customer base the other week (screenshot below). A customer of our responded to the email and their response did some strange things to the formatting.

It removed any of the images we had in the email (which I'm okay with), but it also revealed a button that was toggled off before send but what somehow revealed when they replied to the email (screenshot below). I tried to run a test of this myself and was not able to duplicate the error.

Has anyone ever seen this before or understand why it would be happening?

Original EmailEmail After Customer Responded

[SanfordWhiteman]

You can't rely on any formatting being preserved on a reply or forward. Was this "toggled off" button inside an HTML comment, or were you trying some other method to hide it?

[Dave_Roberts]

If there's a toggle to hide the button, you might also want to try and clear the editable element for the button if that's possible (to get rid of the html). Simply hiding it with CSS isn't enough to actually eliminate it in situations like this, the code itself needs to be cleared (right-click on the editable area and choose "Clear Content").

When you receive an email, there's usually a bunch of styles that get dropped from the email based on which inbox service you use. Most (good) templates are coded with some different layers of code that work for Gmail, Outlook and the rest a little differently. Once you send the email and it ends up in a Gmail inbox, for example, it'll lose all of the code that was written for Outlook (b/c gMail doesn't recognize it as valid code) and some of the code will get interpreted to gel with gMail so it's not the same code getting forwarded as what came to the inbox originally.