Outlook Conditional Statements

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I'm curious what is accomplished by removing comments from an email that were in the template used to create it. Why does the product currently do this?

For me the main issue is that in order to design "mobile first" emails, I need to give my primary content table a width of 100% with a max-width of 600px. This works great on email clients that support the max-width attribute. Not surprisingly, many Outlook versions do not support max-width.  

With two IE conditional comments, I can place another table inside the primary content table with a width of 600px that will only be rendered by certain versions of Outlook.  This is graceful degradation and works perfectly when the conditional comments are present.

Unfortunately, Marketo strips these comments out of the template. Brutal. Thus, the email layout is 100% width, which essentially looks broken. The tables are either fluid - 100% width to work in every possible mobile device, or fixed - 600px to work in browsers like Outlook that don't support max-width attribute. 

Marketo should be leading the way on these types of issues, not falling behind and being totally ignorant of them. 

If it's truly not a problem, maybe Marketo could provide a template that: 
1) renders at 100% width in all mobile devices
2) can be limited to 600px width in Outlook 2007, 2010 and 2013. 
3) doesn't require users to add conditional code to every email before sending 

After Marketo has built this template and successfully run a test of all desktop and mobile devices at Litmus.com, they can share the results and the code. 

At the very least, there should be an option to "allow html comments" in email templates. Because the number of people opening emails in mobile devices is only going up, and crappy versions of Outlook aren't going away, this issue is not going to just go away. More and more developers are going to be asked to develop "mobile first" emails, and more people are going to run into this exact issue. 

Asking clients to add code to every single email before sending it is not even close to practical, and a band-aid solution.

Please fix this. It's a serious bug.

Yes, agree that being told to fix it at the email level is not helpful. What is the point of having email templates if I have to overwrite the HTML in each and every instance of the email. This is not a scalable solution. When I create an email from a template, the email should perform EXACTLY as the template performs.

I can use your approach for individual sends, but I cannot apply that method to templates for my users, which is where they are needed most.

I get that Marketo's policy on this issue is "will not fix," but please do not tell me that this isn't a problem and I should just work around it. I have seen this issue raised multiple times on this board by other frustrated developers. And please do not confuse clear design with a limitation on code. The lack of this functionality actually causes my code to be MORE complex because I have to work out more complicated solutions instead of just using conditionals.

I use Litmus to test and I know exactly what my emails look like across clients. I expect Marketo to be a professional class tool that allows email developers to overcome the limitations of poor programs like Outlook, not lock us into them.

Please try the approach I recommended and see if that solves your problems. 

I used to work on Outlook at Microsoft. The recommendation would be to use basic templates with a clear call-to-action as opposed to getting too fancy. It should be straightfoward to build a simple template that looks good (and is responsive) on all devices. Each email client renders things differently and the more complex your template is, the more likely it is to behave awkwardly on certain clients.

Comments from the template HTML are stripped. I don't know if the comments are stripped during deployment or when the user creates an email from a template.

Sometimes you need to write special code for Outlook to accomplish things that every other client doesn't seem to have a problem with. A very common solution to making two columns collapse to one for mobile involves (as one step of many) a conditional </td><td> that only Outlook can see. The Outlook conditional code is stripped in your system, rendering this practice unusable. This is just one example. Bulletproof buttons also tend to rely on Outlook conditionals as well.

I'm a little surprised that a Marketo employee is asking this kind of question. I would encourage you to get up to speed on what is going on in the email development world by reading some articles at the following sites: http://labs.actionrocket.co/ http://emailwizardry.nightjar.com.au/ https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/ https://litmus.com/blog/ In particular, this article should be fairly enlightening as to why we need this functionality: https://litmus.com/blog/email-design-a-community-of-hacks

Only the TinyMCE rich-text editor, strips things when you edit the HTML. If you go to Email Actions > HTML Tools > Replace HTML, you should be able to add HTML verbatim without anything being stripped. Out of curiosity, why would stripping comments impact the responsive layout definition?