My employer uses Intuit Quickbase for some online databases and Scalix 11.4.6 with Outlook 2003/2007 for email/calender/etc. Starting this past Monday, all emails from QB were appearing blank to Outlook users (appeared normally in WebMail). Our short-term workaround was to request that all emails be plain text. This worked for simple alerts, but is not supported for emailed reports.
We contacted support, but Quickbase said they hadn't made any changes and "it worked for them". I knew that was not correct since previously, an email alert with a few lines of data would be 5KB...but they were now 75KB! I also contacted them via twitter (@IntuitQuickbase) and they responded, but were not very helpful. So, I started digging around. I had a copy of the email's raw formatting and started making changes, resubmitting, making changes, etc...
After a frustrating hour, I found the cause of the issue. It is related to some formatting that QB started including in their messages the previous weekend. Here is the specific section:
/* Because of the way tables are nested within a div and the scroll is set on the div,
all browsers with the exception of IE think the width of the div should not include scrollbar
width and therefore end up overlapping the field names with scrollbar. Adding some padding to avoid scroll-x and width setting changes.
Only for browers other than IE. Changes affect Field & Markers dropdown on NotificationEdit and Fields dropdown for formula builder.*/
html>/**/body #ftDiv
{
padding-right:10px;
}
The use of the “&” symbol on line 4 appears to be the issue. If I edit the message source and change the “&” to “and” or remove, I can resubmit the message and it displays properly. At first I believed that this is a reserved character that can not be used in this context, but now I think that it is just a Scalix Connect for Outlook bug. I have a support ticket open with Scalix, too bad they might be dead. Once I found this was the cause, I updated QB support and they have been very helpful. They have updated code on their test servers and worked with us to confirm a fix. Now we are just waiting for it to go into production. Thanks QB Support!
