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Design

How to style hr tags for emails so that they would work in Outlook 2010, 2013

Hello,

I guess Fabio Carneiro would be the best person to answer this. I have been trying to style hr tags in a mailchimp template, however in outlook the hr elements do not have the color I assign to them, so I would like to know what is the best way to assign the color to the hr element in this case, so far I have been embedding the css property for this.

Please let me know, Thanks!

Fabio Carneiro
Fabio Carneiro
Treehouse Guest Teacher

Hey Daniele,

Apologies for the late reply. Outlook has spotty support for styling on an HR element, so if you want something that renders consistently across clients, your best bet is to go with the method Jonas Mørkeby detailed: use a table with border styles, and make sure the table cell isn't empty.

4 Answers

Lucas Santos
Lucas Santos
19,315 Points

I would just do inline CSS like this

<hr style="border:1px solid #F00;" />

Lucas Santos
Lucas Santos
19,315 Points

I have no idea why my code is not showing

Lucas Santos
Lucas Santos
19,315 Points

<hr style="border:1px solid #F00;"/>

Thanks Lucas, but I still cannot see your code, also I already tried to style the hr element with inline css, but when I view the email in Outlook, the color is not assigned, it takes a default grey color instead.

Jonas Mørkeby
Jonas Mørkeby
3,530 Points

FYI the "Markdown Cheatsheet" beneath the comment box tells you how to paste code into the comments... :)

Jonas Mørkeby
Jonas Mørkeby
3,530 Points

Hi Daniele.

I found this on another forum: <table> <tr> <td style="background:none; border:solid 1px #999999; border-width:1px 0 0 0; height:1px; width:100%; margin:0px 0px 0px 0px; padding-top:10px;padding-bottom:10px;"> </td> </tr> </table>

Given that emails are most often build of tables, styling a td to look like an hr might actually work... I haven't been able to try it yet, but let me know if it works!

Jonas Mørkeby
Jonas Mørkeby
3,530 Points

Wow... It happened to me too :)

<table>
<tr>
<td style="background:none; border:dotted 1px #999999; border-width:1px 0 0 0; height:1px; width:100%; margin:0px 0px 0px 0px; padding-top:10px;padding-bottom:10px;">&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
</table>

Just be aware that the line in this case is dotted... But you might want to have it in another color too.

And also remember the &nbsp; to make sure that the td is shown if the browser/client isn't able to read empty cells.

Lucas Santos
Lucas Santos
19,315 Points

<hr style="border:1px solid #F00;"/> that's what I had written, thanks for the heads up Jonas. I see Outlook always gives the most problems but if that doesn't work I think Jonas is on to something.

Thanks Lucas, I will try it tomorrow and let you know.