I have a html email which works correctly in every client except Outlook 2003, where the links have underlines (even with text-decoration: none;) and the font-size changes to be smaller.
Excerpt from code:
<td valign="top" align="left" style="line-height: 31px; font-size: 31px;">
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="3" color="#6b565d" style="line-height: 60px; font-size: 62px;"><strong>25% off</strong></font>
</td>
Sample Link:
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="3" color="#ffffff" style="line-height: 16px; font-size: 22px;"><a href="<squeeze.attribute.link.story01_text>" title="Book your sale room now" style="color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; font-size:22px; background-color: #b50f18;"><font color="#ffffff"><strong>Mooo, I'm some text >></strong></font></a></font>
And this font-size changes to around 11 or 12px.
Any ideas?
Lot's of Markup in your code there. I just tried how Outlook 2010's markup looks when sending e-mail - because having links without underline works flawlessly when sending mails to Outlook 2003. Without further ado:
<a href="http://example.org">
<span style='text-decoration:none;'>My Link Text not underlined</span>
</a>
The important thing to note: It puts a span within the link for styling. No usage of <font> whatsoever.
Outlook has the nice "feature" to autocomplete hyperlinks - AFAIK this is only for text you type, but it might be worth a shot, maybe the clients are autocompleting your links to be underlined? (Really just guessing). There is a hotfix to turn of autocompleting links here ( one still needs to fiddle in the registry and create a DWORD named DisableAutoUrlCompletion at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Preferences).
Just for completeness here the full e-mail body of a really simple e-mail sent with Outlook 2010 showing flawlessly in Outlook 2003 (same font size, no underline - all the same). [Bear in mind - lot's of Microsoft "junk" in there which is not really needed, like Calibri styles even though Arial was used]
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o=
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"
xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml" xmlns=
"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 14 (filtered medium)" />
<style type="text/css">
/*<![CDATA[*/
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Calibri;
panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0cm;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";}
a:link, span.MsoHyperlink
{mso-style-priority:99;
color:blue;
text-decoration:underline;}
a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed
{mso-style-priority:99;
color:purple;
text-decoration:underline;}
span.EmailStyle17
{mso-style-type:personal-compose;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
color:windowtext;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";}
@page WordSection1
{size:612.0pt 792.0pt;
margin:70.85pt 70.85pt 2.0cm 70.85pt;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
-->
/*]]>*/
</style><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:shapedefaults v:ext="edit" spidmax="1026" />
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:shapelayout v:ext="edit">
<o:idmap v:ext="edit" data="1" />
</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]-->
<title></title>
</head>
<body lang="EN-US" link="blue" vlink="purple" xml:lang="EN-US">
<div class="WordSection1">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="DE" style=
'font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:black' xml:lang=
"DE"><a href="http://example.org/"><span style=
'color:black;text-decoration:none'>test</span></a></span></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>