A CRM email signature was rendering its logos centred instead of left aligned, and the usual way of checking said it was fine. What makes it worth writing up is not the fix, it is that the check itself was blind. The same message looks correct in Outlook whichever account it arrives through, so opening it in a second mailbox would have confirmed the wrong answer twice.
- The defect was invisible in the one place it was being checked. The editor that composes these emails wraps every inserted image in a block that carries two separate instructions to centre it. Gmail, Apple Mail and mobile webmail all obey those instructions. Outlook renders with a different engine that ignores both, so it quietly left aligns and shows a clean result. An earlier review had raised the centring and been told it could be ignored, on the grounds that it was not showing up in Outlook. That reasoning used the one client blind to the fault as the judge of whether a fault existed.
- Patching the stored record did not work, three times, and the record was not the problem. The signature is held in three separate fields. Each was corrected and verified, and two subsequent sends still arrived centred with no trace of the correction. In the same message, a content card inserted by a small script came through correctly aligned. That contrast was the whole diagnosis: inserting a signature makes the editor redraw the images and reapply its own default, discarding whatever was stored, while the script writes the entire body as one value and the editor accepts it unchanged.
- So the fix had to move to the only write that survives. The card script already rebuilds the whole body each time it runs, so it now normalises alignment in the same pass. The trade is stated rather than hidden: it straightens every image in the body, not only the two logos, and it only runs when a card is inserted. Both are acceptable here and both are recorded, because an undocumented side effect becomes a defect the moment somebody wants a centred image.
- One behaviour explained three separate symptoms, and a finding that was true elsewhere was false here. Paragraph spacing was collapsing, the logos were centred, and a gap above the card kept vanishing. All three came from the same normalising pass: it zeroes margins on paragraphs, collapses empty lines, and rewraps bare images. Earlier work had established that a plain paragraph keeps the mail client's own spacing, which is correct on the path where the text is written directly into the record and wrong on the path that goes through the editor. Same markup, opposite result, because different software touches it.