Base Tag Not Supported In Hotmail

It’s interesting how the <base> works in various clients. I thought all major web clients would support it, but apparently it is not the case.

Let’s look at how some email clients process this tag:

Yahoo.com! Web Mail

Base tags are modified by their mail server and relative URLs are changed to absolute. So it works.

Gmail Web Mail

Base tags are modified by their mail server and relative URLs are changed to absolute. So it works.

Gmail Account via Thunderbird

Base tags are shown and its functionality is intact. URLs remain relative. So it works.

iMS Account via Outlook 2007

Base tags are shown and its functionality is intact. URLs remain relative. So it works. More info on iMS.

ShinyLight Account via iPhone

Can’t see the HTML, but all URLs worked.

Hotmail

Unfortunately, this is the ugly duckling. Hotmail servers remove the base tag and leave your relative links as relative. Big FAIL.