My white template arrives grey

A designed template has two backgrounds, and they are set in different places:

• the blocks — the rows your text, images and buttons sit in;
• the page — everything outside them.

Content only ever runs about 600 pixels wide, so the page colour shows down both sides of every email. Outlook draws that strip as a hard edge, which is why a template whose rows are all white can still arrive looking off-white with a faint frame around it: the rows are white, the page behind them is not.

Set the page colour in the editor's body panel. Open the panel that controls the whole message rather than a single row, find its background colour, and set it to white. The change shows in the preview immediately, and it is saved with the template.

Templates you create from now on start on white, so this only affects ones built before that or ones where the page colour was changed deliberately. Some of the ready-made designs use a white card on a light grey page on purpose — that is a design choice, not a fault, and the same panel changes it.

If the frame is still there after the page is white, check the outermost row: a row with its own light grey background looks identical to a grey page.