Hotmail have recently released an update which is affecting the rendering of the copyright symbol © in all emails. This has caused widespread issues for email marketers across the industry and there have been several workarounds offered.
The problem
The ASCII code that is used to create a copyright symbol is “©”. Previously, this rendered exactly the same as any other HTML copy, but a couple of weeks ago we identified that Hotmail are rolling out their Emoji emoticons, and they replace the symbol with an image of 19 pixels in height, and unfortunately will only appear in dark grey. At the moment, there doesn’t appear to be a code fix to override this.
There are other symbol which are being affected by this update including ® ®, &trade ™.
The solution
There are a few ways to overcome this. You could use an image to replace the symbol/ASCII or use the word copyright or (c) instead of the symbols. There have been various attempts at forcing Hotmail to render the symbols naturally using CSS but we have not seen or found a consistent solution following this method, so we advise that you consider one of our proposed solutions above.
If you’d like to speak to me or one of our consultancy team members about your email design and find out a bit more about this rendering problem, don’t hesitate to get in contact.
