VB E-Mail Breaks With HTML?

[bscivtampa]

Good Morning,

I am not a programmer, but instead a business owner who has 97% of my custom built software complete. Unfortunately my developers didn't finish the last bit before moving on to another project. I wanted to point that out as I will most likely ask some novice questions regarding VB.

Inside of our software (written on VB.net) we have an e-mail admin section for automated e-mails sent when certain actions occur. These e-mails populate variables/values from the DB before sending. I have noticed that the e-mails work perfectly fine unless I make seemingly simple changes to them. For example, If I add a <p></p> section with text the code breaks and the e-mail doesn't populate correctly, leaving many of the would-be filled in values blank.

Although I don't know much about VB/ASP, I do have a very solid understanding of HTML and PHP. The text that I input does not in any way affect the DB values of the existing e-mail and the HTML is correctly inputted. I can only assume the e-mail breaks because I do not know some very important yet VB-specific rule. Assuming that my problem is common, can someone please let me know how to solve this - What am I doing incorrectly?

[proneal]

a VB specific rule would be to handle all possible errors. Your programmers didn't do that obviously or your email would not break.
Other than that, unless I can see the code that sends email, then I can't help you.
A psychic might be able to help.
Resident psychic coders will pop in since they will 'see' that this post requires their immediate attention.

Since I am partial psychic myself, I will predict that they did not allow for html formatting concerning user input-ie: admin sending a personal custom html email.

[kareninstructor]

There is a good resource available which may be of some assistance

http://www.systemnetmail.com/default.aspx

[Niya]

I agree with proneal on this, I really think you should contact your developers about that. Even if you have the source code, I'm willing to bet that it being a production application, it is going have have a lot of code, even if its just the email portion. I'm certain we aren't going to be able to solve whatever issue it has in any sensible time mainly because we really wouldn't know where to start looking. Only the developer who actually wrote the code would know this. For any other developer to solve it, they would need to really sit down and study the code to get a gist of how the original developer(s) implemented it. Depending on how complex it is and how it may be coupled with other parts of the application, this could take a few hours or a week. I don't think anyone here would devote that kind of time to help with a single problem.

If however its a tiny application that stands alone and does only this task, then we may be able to help if we see the source.