Outlook cannot index mail sent via dashboard subscription

#1

The dashboard subscription email seems to be formatted incorrectly somehow, then Microsoft Outlook cannot index it. Then you can't find the text from either the body of the email or the attachment. Can this be improved?

Summary

{
"browser-info": {
"language": "cs-CZ",
"platform": "Win32",
"userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.162 Safari/537.36",
"vendor": "Google Inc."
},
"system-info": {
"file.encoding": "UTF-8",
"java.runtime.name": "Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment",
"java.runtime.version": "1.8.0_331-b09",
"java.vendor": "Oracle Corporation",
"java.vendor.url": "http://java.oracle.com/",
"java.version": "1.8.0_331",
"java.vm.name": "Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM",
"java.vm.version": "25.331-b09",
"os.name": "Windows Server 2019",
"os.version": "10.0",
"user.language": "en",
"user.timezone": "Europe/Paris"
},
"metabase-info": {
"databases": [
"h2",
"sqlserver",
"oracle",
"mysql"
],
"hosting-env": "unknown",
"application-database": "mysql",
"application-database-details": {
"database": {
"name": "MariaDB",
"version": "10.4.12-MariaDB"
},
"jdbc-driver": {
"name": "MariaDB Connector/J",
"version": "2.7.5"
}
},
"run-mode": "prod",
"version": {
"tag": "v0.43.1",
"date": "2022-05-16",
"branch": "release-x.43.x",
"hash": "7f1a1c4"
},
"settings": {
"report-timezone": null
}
}
}

#2

Hi @CZvacko
Sounds like you are seeing this issue:
https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/6874 - upvote by clicking :+1: on the first post

I don't know how Outlook indexing works. Sounds like there might be a bug in Outlook if it is not indexing plain text. Indexing rarely handle images or SVG elements.

#3

Hi @flamber,
it seems to be related to charts, in my case the mail contains only text strings.
Outlook also displays a complaint with a message like "If there are problems with how this message is displayed, click here to view it in a web browser" this usually doesn't happen.

I also tried to verify the HTML code of the message using w3.org and in addition to the "common errors", it also displays Fatal Error as follows:

fatal
fatal.jpg1076×798 189 KB

Could that be a clue?

#4

@CZvacko Emails are usually created in a very simplistic way, since email clients does usually not support most things that modern browsers all.
There are so many hacks used to be able to present emails is the best way on all clients, example:
https://github.com/metabase/metabase/blob/master/src/metabase/email/pulse.mustache#L4

#5

@flamber
right, but these hacks should not cause fatal errors in the validator. Many email clients depend on standards.

#6

@CZvacko True, some email clients follow the standards - Outlook is definitely not one of them. Outlook has one of the worst history of completely ignoring standards and trying to brute-force their own "standards" because of monopoly.

It is very difficult to built things that works on many email clients. You are welcome to provide a PR if you have a lot of knowledge about email clients.