For those of you who don’t know this, I seem to be that guy who is “blessed” with the ability to stump the highest tier tech support people at any given organization with issues they’ve never seen before.

Here’s the latest one:

As we market FrontGate Media to marketers seeking to reach the family, faith-based and faith-friendly markets, we do direct email blasts that include reach to Gmail users. We are sending our email to someone@gmail.com. They ARE NOT ABLE to click and view links to any PDF files linked inside the body copy of any email IF they are viewing their GMAIL inside of INTERNET EXPLORER.  The links won’t launch.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve listed the link as long-form text like https://www.frontgatemedia.com/mediakits/hear-it-first.pdf or as linked text like HearItFirst Media Kit. No link going to a .PDF file will open from email viewed through Gmail via Internet Explorer.

I brought this issue up to Swiftpage (our provider) and after a few weeks of testing, they narrowed the problem down solely to Gmail viewed in IE.

When sending to someone solo in Gmail, or when sending a direct email, you will want to either link them to an HTML page with that content from your PDF or use a PHP link to the PDF rather than liking directly to a PDF file.

You can also send an attached PDF rather than a link, but sometimes file size makes that unpractical.

If you don’t want to convert your PDF into HTML, then you can have your developer create a PHP page to display your PDFs.  We’ve done that for all the media kits on our site. To check out the in PDF vs PHP presentation difference, just CLICK HERE and then choose any media kit via the VIEW link – that’s the PHP.  If you click the DOWNLOAD link, that’s the PDF.