Josh Williams

wrote on August 2, 2005 3:26 AM

Hey Mark,

What was your experience with Eudora? We've found (so far) that it pretty much has no CSS support. Thoughts?

Josh

Brent

wrote on August 2, 2005 6:01 AM

I came across this site that has great CSS information for emailers. This article goes over several email providers (not all) and gives the ins and outs on CSS and email.
http://www.css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=StyleInEmail

Mark Wyner

wrote on August 2, 2005 6:51 AM

Josh,

I tried to test Eudora but it was difficult.

For starters, the link on their site to provide an installer for Mac yields an empty .zip file. I tried downloading this using five different browsers, and all produced the same results. I emailed Eudora about the problem and they never responded. I did test CSS in an earlier version of Eudora for Mac, though, and it completely destroyed everything, lacking virtually any support for CSS.

I was, however, able to download/install Eudora on a PC. I tested my email in Eudora 6.2 on the PC, and it had great support for CSS. Everything in my sample rendered properly. But when I interviewed friends/family/colleagues about which email clients they used (approximately 40 people of a random demographic), I couldn't find a single person who used Eudora.

I used Eudora on Mac OS 6 or 7 (years ago) and it was great. I'm pretty sure it was THE leading client back then. But with today's leaders, Eudora is falling behind. So, Eudora users on the PC are in for a treat with CSS-based markup, but Mac Eudora users are in for a rough ride.

I hope this helps.

ben scott

wrote on August 2, 2005 9:03 PM

i found that the tables solution was a good way to ensure things like logos come out in an email in the correct place e.g. if there is no css support at least youve got your pics and your headers as rich text.

I also found that the mac mail takes fonts and makes them slightly smaller than other email clients, so i went for a fixed font size like pixels and this solves the problem.

wrapping the div tags like (div.bodywork) as suggested in the listapart article also helps

one thing to also consider is the width of the email as it will look different in the screen once you have it in an email client compared to hotmail. Hotmail and other web email solutions nearly always have a left corner navigation of at least 200 pixels, which leaves you with around 600 to reasonably play with.
Take into consideration that a large margin on your email in the hotmail screen will start to look very strange and that it also will look strange if there is no margin in an email client (especially if you are printing)

check my result

toby stokes

wrote on August 3, 2005 12:52 AM

Yes, hotmail does strip out styles if they're included in the head of your document, but its perfectly valid to put the style tag inside the document body (best somewhere near the top). This avoids writing out all the styles inline

kevin klein

wrote on August 3, 2005 6:13 AM

thx mark - these are all great tips. I'm a former Tucson-ian who remembers your excellent illustrations that graced the pages of the Tucson Weekly. Who would have thought you would become a web design/CSS mensch?

David Hucklesby

wrote on August 3, 2005 11:29 AM

As Toby Stokes noted, Hotmail strips all contents of HEAD but will retain a STYLE block elsewhere. But it strips out ALL declarations of MARGIN, whether embedded or in line.

I found all clients I tested allowed me to omit the entire HEAD as well as the surrounding BODY tags.

Cordially, David.

Wesley Walser

wrote on August 4, 2005 5:10 AM

It's interesting to see how much further we have come in just knowledge since the ALA article on this back in the day.

Dave

wrote on August 4, 2005 5:57 AM

Great post! My main responsibility at work is designing html emails and I have been trying to get the higher ups to approve the use of standard-based markup. I will definitely be forwarding this on to them.

David

wrote on August 4, 2005 7:17 AM

First, in reply to the comment right above me: I am a standards based junkie as well and I have even done some css based emails and I hate tables but I still don't really see a big reason to switch to css emails from html emails if the html emails that you are creating are working fine. I mean, why switch to css and ask the "higher-ups" to switch if it means the email will be less accessible to some people?

Nice article, had to bookmark it - Getting ready to design and build another css based email for a very picky client- I know this guy will complain and whine it doesnt look perfect in Eudora and I'll have to pimp slap him and tell him noone uses eudora. Heh.

David

Eric

wrote on August 4, 2005 11:17 PM

Ummmm, you forgot to test (or perhaps you didn't forget) Lotus Notes, which is one of the biggest corporate email systems, and also one of the worst systems for HTML email.

ClimaxDesigns

wrote on August 5, 2005 5:40 AM

All these comments are helpful to me. I am just now jumping on the ban wagon as far as standards go and just did an email yesterday with css based design. I did everything inline on a sheer whim and all the clients we tested on it looked fine. Its good to know that i can avoid inlineing the css by meremly putting the style block within the div container. very helpful indeed.

Rob

wrote on August 5, 2005 1:40 PM

Eric's comment about Lotus Notes is on the money.

The company I work for sends HTML-based e-mail reports to most clients, with the exception of customers who use Lotus Notes. They get the plain text version, which converts the columns of data (usually four to five columns wide) into one LONG text column.

Has anyone successfully formatted an e-mail to a Notes recipient with HTML?

Prabhath Sirisena

wrote on August 5, 2005 1:47 PM

Thanks for the insights Mark. I did a few html emails some time ago which used CSS for positioning, and the client was okay with the stripping done by most webmail clients. However, when trying to forward the mail in Outlook, it messed up the styles (although Thunderbird held up well...) - that was the end of that design job.

Is it possible to make html emails retain styles when forwarding? Perhaps that's asking too much...

Mark Wyner

wrote on August 5, 2005 5:37 PM

Ben Scott: What you're proposing in using Tables for presentation can be accomplished using CSS. If you use CSS background images, they'll obviously disappear in clients that don't support CSS. However, if you want an image (such as a logo) to appear in that case, just print it inline. In a situation like that, I carefully consider how I want an image (sans CSS) to appear and mark up my document accordingly.

David Mysterious: You said…

I mean, why switch to css and ask the "higher-ups" to switch if it means the email will be less accessible to some people?

Using CSS for presentational markup hardly makes anything less accessible. On the contrary, it helps ensure accessibility. While a Hotmail recipient will see something similar to rich-text, thus losing the visual-design characteristics, a blind recipient will hear a clean read of the email. From my perspective, that's infinitely more important. But let's not start another debate about whether or not we should send HTML emails or use CSS for their presentation.

Eric and Rob: Lotus Notes is the worst excuse for an email client I know of. Everyone with which I've spoken who is forced to use that horrible software incessantly complains about it. I sent my test email to one of my clients that uses (complains about) Lotus Notes and he said "it looks no crappier than any other HTML email I receive." If there's anyone out there that has a hot tip on pleasing Lotus Notes, please do share.

Prabhath Sirisena: It's funny you mention forwarding HTML emails, because clients often tell me things like "your email looks nice, but when it's forwarded it falls apart." Unfortunately, I don't believe there's a way to resolve this issue. Most email clients offer clues for recipeints of forwarded/replied-to emails to distinguish between original and new text such as indenting, additional characters (>), etc. And this gets in the way of an HTML email's original formatting. Furthermore, there are countless settings/preferences across the board about how an HTML email is handled when it is forwarded, such as whether or not it is first converted to plain-text. I suspect it would be a very difficult task to retain formatting under those circumstances. Microsoft's Outlook (big surprise) is the worst example of this, as it adds proprietary code to its HTML-formatted emails.

Thanks for the comments, everyone.

Roger Johansson

wrote on August 10, 2005 4:40 PM

Toby Stokes mentioned putting a style block inside the body element. It may work, but it is not valid HTML. The style element is only allowed in the head section: Header style information.

Jonathan Poh

wrote on August 11, 2005 11:47 PM

With Apple Mail, if you Forward a HTML mail it gets broken, but if you Redirect it, the html stays (mostly) intact, depending on the complexity of the underlying markup. I'm running Mail 2.02 on Mac OS X 10.4.2, but I'm sure it worked on earlier versions, just not sure how far back.

Mark Wyner

wrote on August 13, 2005 9:57 AM

Jonathan Poh:

You brought up something which previously didn't occur to me. The term "forward," even in this context, can mean two different things:

1. automatic forwarding by scripts or rules set on mail applications or with ISPs/OSPs
2. manual forwarding from an email client

When I mentioned "forwarding" in my comments, I intended to convey the latter. And once an email client has its hands on an HTML email, the forwarding falls to pieces. However, I didn't test the impact of the former and am unsure as to the impact it would have on HTML emails in general. I would assume, based on my understanding of automatic forwarding, that HTML emails (CSS or otherwise) would not be affected in that scenario. This is because the email is just rerouted from one location to another. But I'm not positive, especially having not tested that.

If anyone has an authoritative opinion on this matter, it would be great to hear from you.

Tim Hill

wrote on August 18, 2005 9:36 AM

re: Roger Johansson; While not valid, your html design looks nice in Hotmail and the alternative is to code inline, which would be valid but would be tedious to update for longer emails. I'm not sure wearing a badge of valid html would work well with emails, just seems you would be expending alot of time and effort to have valid code while removing support for a majority base of users (while text is still there, users on the whole would be more likely to click on a html email than a text one).

re: Mark; While i'm not sure on your first point, manual forwarding i've noticed in our work environment with microsoft outlook, as long as you switch off microsoft word editing for emails, when you forward they seem to work well. We've designed templates for the company to use in Outlook, and use css to control different Heading styles which anyone can change in their email and they don't have to copy and paste a style from anywhere else.

Roger Johansson

wrote on September 6, 2005 6:04 AM

Tim: Right, you may need to rely on email clients handling invalid HTML. I was just noting that style elements are not allowed in the body section, which was claimed in an earlier comment.

J. J.

wrote on September 9, 2005 1:51 AM

Sorry to be so elementary, but is there an easy way to create these kinds of HTML emails in Outlook or Thunderbird, or are you assuming use of something like PHPMailer or HotCast?

JJ Ravgiala

wrote on September 23, 2005 5:20 AM

I have made a newsletter thats works in Lotus Notes

David Greiner

wrote on September 23, 2005 8:08 AM

JJ, that's great. Care to post a link to the campaign and discuss how you went about designing the newsletter?

Dan H

wrote on October 22, 2005 10:20 AM

I work for a clothing retail company that uses Lotus Notes and regularly sends marketing html e-mails. We test on all the popular clients, and also send out tests to our people here at the office that use Notes. We've gotten pretty good at it, but we're unable to get background images to work either thru css or just html. Anyone know a fix for this if there is one?

mroberts

wrote on November 3, 2005 6:32 AM

RE: LOTUS NOTES
Man, I should be charging (BIG) money for this...
I have spent hours, painful hours, coding html for Blotus Notes and have several suggestions:
1. Always specify td widths (in at least one row, without colspans, for each table), unless you really want your 600 px table to be something like 2000 pixels wide -- just wider than you can scroll to.
2. Notes will not draw an image smaller than 12x12 pixels, so your spacer.gif with a background color for nice clean borders will draw at a minimum of 12 px (if you didn't specify td widths, it could be hundreds of pixels wide). You can get around this by including that nice clean border in an image at least 12 x 12. Or use table borders and live with the thicker line, which will not always be the color you want, depending upon the browser. Or just live with their crappy implementation of this.
3. At a certain point nested tables will blow up and make your page too wide (by some small margin, like 1000 pixels). I worry and test as I go on coding a new template. But you can usually get away with 3 or 4 nested tables. (CSS standards crowd please control yourselves. Some clients think that "graceful degradation" in html-capable email clients isn't very impressive. They say, "that's nice but can you make it look like the comp since it does display html?")
4. Background images are junked.
5. It puts a border around the first link... nothing to do about it.
6. It will choke on different combinations of rowspans and/or colspans, some you can get away with, but others not. Sometimes you have to start a new table (for now apparent reason!!!), but sometimes it will insert a paragraph break before that table, usually not... it's hard to predict.
7. I doesn't give the normal paragraph (ie, vertical) spacing to unordered lists. I usually just live with this - I'm not formatting the list in a nested table if I can help it.
8. It can't handle links down the page. So if you have links at the top of your email that go to sections further down the email, it will try to open the link in a browser. This one really gets me. You either have to live with it or link them to an online version of the email.

So many if its behaviors just make me cry out "why oh why oh why oh why...." Messing up anchor links going down the page - perhaps the most basic html connectivity function -- there is just no excuse for. Not drawing one pixels images? How did this pass any round of testing/approval??? Sigh... Since there are many fudge factors, it takes a few rounds of testing to get a new template just right. It will listen to text styles pretty well, but I haven't gotten any fancier with css and Notes... And many of the issues go away if you use its webmail in IE.

Good Luck.

mroberts

wrote on November 3, 2005 8:13 AM

Oh, one more thing, if you are using jump pages for metrics purposes, but print a full url (with the http:// ) it will link straight to the url printed and ignore what is in the href attribute of your anchor tag. Ain't that cute!

hvogt

wrote on November 4, 2005 9:47 PM

Does anybody know if there are any statistics about the usage of the different mail clients? How many mac users are using Entourage, Apple Mail or other clients? Thanks for any hint.

qlic

wrote on November 5, 2005 8:30 AM

I also would like to know about any statistics about the usage of the different mail clients. This would be of great help

Dave Greiner

wrote on November 8, 2005 11:20 AM

Firstly, mroberts - thanks so much for the comprehensive information on the many quirks in Lotus Notes. That's a scary number of faults to cater to.

In regards to email usage statistics, there's a suprising lack of recent statistics available online. Here are a few places to start:

Survey of E-Mail Format Preferences and Programs - Web Marketing Today (2003)

Real-World Email Client Usage: The Hard Data - Clickz (2002)

This one certainly deserves more attention, so if anyone knows of any other interesting statistics, please add them. If any more surface I'll be sure to add them here too.

Jono

wrote on November 10, 2005 2:04 AM

About Yahoo and xposition
"Yahoo Mail does, however, attack with irreparable damage when it comes to positioning. Just as ‹body› becomes ‹xbody›, ‹position› becomes ‹xposition›. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a workaround for this issue..."

It's a long shot, but would this work to position a header:

h1 {
position: absolute;
top: 10px;
left: 25px;
/* for yahoo */
xposition: absolute;
top: 10px;
left: 25px;
}

--

It's not valid, but maybe Yahoo would see it and like it, OR maybe Yahoo would just render it as:

h1 {
xposition: absolute;
top: 10px;
left: 25px;
/* for yahoo */
xxposition: absolute; /* Yahoo adds another "x" to "xposition"
top: 10px;
left: 25px;
}

I'm curious, did you try that? It is a definite no-no, but it could possibly work?

Maybe even using multiple classes:

h1.allClients {
position: absolute;
top: 10px;
left: 25px;
}
h1.yahoo {
xposition: absolute;
top: 10px;
left: 25px;
}

Then in the html apply - class="allClients yahoo" - to the h1 tag in hte html.

I can’t remember if email clients support multiple classes, I’ll have to go back and check the ALA article. I cannot currently test this, but if anyone can, I'd be interested to see how it works out?

Dave Greiner

wrote on November 14, 2005 2:20 PM

Further to mroberts info about Lotus Notes and HTML email, this article is definitely worth a read also.

Johan De Silva

wrote on November 24, 2005 10:33 PM

This is really good. CSS is pain for me though because I cant get it to look good in Outlook by simply copying and pasting so that my boss can see a preview before it goes out.

Dave Greiner

wrote on November 25, 2005 8:03 AM

Johan,

You should use our Test Campaign Design tool for this one. Just copy and paste the URL of your design, enter your bosses email address and click send, it's free and that easy.

Heather

wrote on November 30, 2005 2:59 AM

We have a problem with Virgin ISP, they block all our html email campaigns. Has anybody else come across this problem with Virgin?

Neo Vertigo

wrote on December 1, 2005 10:56 PM

Thanks for the insights Mark. I did a few html emails some time ago which used CSS for positioning, and the client was okay with the stripping done by most webmail clients. However, when trying to forward the mail in Outlook, it messed up the styles (although Thunderbird held up well...) - that was the end of that design job. It's my site: world news

Is it possible to make html emails retain styles when forwarding? Perhaps that's asking too much...

adrock

wrote on December 15, 2005 9:42 AM

this is cool and all but what if i have a black bg with white font? It will not print the words, given that the css is embedded how can i resolve the print issue without having to sacrifice the design?

peter

wrote on December 21, 2005 4:38 AM

there must be away to get background images to work
when i specify them in teh tag they work but only in yahoo
Its driving me nuts

James Touhey

wrote on December 22, 2005 8:42 AM

No disrespect Mark but I checked out your code in the sample download and it really seems like you have a lot of unnecessary markup for such a simple email. What's the deal? Are you totally against recycling your classes or using a header image and hiding your h1 tag? I suppose it's the efficiency factor i'm looking at.

Mark Wyner

wrote on January 6, 2006 7:57 AM

It's great to see a nice discussion about Lotus Notes. And for whatever it's worth, I have some new insight.

I recently installed the latest version (6.5) on my Windows XP testing machine so I could pass some emails through it. Using the techniques I've outlined in my articles resulted in emails that were rendered not unlike that of Google Mail. Lotus Notes displayed an email resembling a rich-text document, whereby headers, lists, paragraphs, bold, italic, etc. were all respectfully presented (thanks to the semantic markup) and the entire graphical presentation was cloaked.

From my perspective, this is perfect because the email is accessible by Lotus Notes users with contextual hierarchies are preserved. And since Lotus Notes users are accustomed to seeing broken HTML emails (as per every Notes user I've questioned), I believe seeing one that appears to be rich-text would be the preferred result.

To James Touhey: I'm not "against" any of your favorite techniques for efficiency. For reference, I specifically constructed this email so that the techniques therein would be plain to see. Using tons of shorthand and advanced coding would throw off many beginners, who may miss the point of the approach. And the goal was to not showcase my advanced CSS-coding abilities, but rather to share with my colleagues what I believe to be a valuable approach to using CSS in HTML emails. But thanks for your valuable critique.

Dan

wrote on January 6, 2006 9:05 AM

Yes, hotmail does strip generic viagra out styles if they're included in the head of your document, but its perfectly valid to put the style tag inside the document body (best somewhere near the top). This avoids writing out all the styles inline

Pavel

wrote on January 7, 2006 5:54 AM

I required for your CSS on my site http://www.gadaem.com.
Thank you!

Cheget

wrote on January 12, 2006 5:26 AM

Survey of E-Mail is an extremley informative resource...

Suhail

wrote on January 13, 2006 9:14 AM

Hi
I've been experiencing a problem with Hotmail where HTML entities are displayed, but with a strange character (Â - a circumflex accent I think) before it. Has anyone else experienced this problem? When I view source, the " " and "£" have been converted to spaces and pounds and there's no accent character! Any ideas?
Thanks

El. Brus

wrote on January 18, 2006 2:19 AM

During the transfer of any kind of information there are a sender, a channel and a receiver. A channel (language, email clients, html protocol, etc.) may cause an information loss or its distortion. So, if it is important for a sender how his message will be understood, he HAS to know the possibilities of receiving party. And this is the main problem - you have to know the exact email client and it’s version to be sure. In words of mobile world: “If you want to get the right answer, learn how your girl’s mobile shows this smiley…??
Regards El. Brus from....MantaCorp

Jeremy Zawodny

wrote on January 23, 2006 10:31 PM

Thanks for the insights Mark. I did a few html emails some time ago which used CSS for positioning, and the client was okay with the stripping done by most webmail clients. However, when trying to forward the mail in Outlook, it messed up the styles (although Thunderbird held up well...) - that was the end of that design job.

Is it possible to make html emails retain styles when forwarding? Perhaps that's asking too much...

sermad

wrote on January 24, 2006 11:54 PM

Re Lotus notes and mroberts

Sir I cannot thank you enough. The 12pixel issue WILL happen to you all so please bear this mind. You've saved me countless hours of misery. Thankyou.

Kirill Kolenchits

wrote on February 1, 2006 8:20 AM

I work for a clothing retail company that uses Lotus Notes and regularly sends marketing html e-mails. We test on all the popular clients, and also send out tests to our people here at the office that use Notes. We've gotten pretty good at it, but we're unable to get background images to work either thru css or just html. Anyone know a fix for this if there is one?

jumptronic

wrote on February 16, 2006 6:08 AM

Background images will not display in Lotus notes (6.5). However, BG colors will. Others around the office (myself included) have tried to figure a way to get background images to display...to no avail.

Alex Stacey

wrote on February 26, 2006 2:15 AM

Some useful info here thanks! I've been building and testing a new email campain and trying to make it look the same in Opera's M2 email client and Gmail and Hotmail as these are the 3 main ones I use. I still have the joys of testing in some of the others to look forward to!

Anyway, an interesting thing about Opera's M2 client is that it squashes images width by about 10px if they are contained in a div. I have spent about 2 days working on this now and have finally realised what was happenning and have taken the header and footer graphics outside of any divs and it displays fine.

Then I had to play around with the padding on a containing div to overcome the strange thing Hotmail does when it strips all margin tags. (Why have they done that? i don't get it)

Anyway, just thought i'd share my little find for what it's worth.

Alex =]

andipandi

wrote on March 24, 2006 8:43 AM

thank you for the great articles... I tried the tricks of making sure I had div#id and p.class specified, moved the styles to within the body, and still hotmail and gmail refuse to obey. I'm about ready to give up and use tables, especially since I just found out that the end user is going to take my carefully coded css file, open it in word, and edit and send the email that way... ::cries::

andipandi

wrote on March 24, 2006 8:44 AM

also, I downloaded your file and was deeply chagrined to find that your css doesn't have to do any of those tricks, yet displays excellently in all but hotmail and gmail. hotmail refuses to receive it though.

andipandi

wrote on March 24, 2006 8:46 AM

keep thinking of more things to add:

best browsers for compliance I've found so far, .mac webmail, entourage, and surprisingly, aol webmail. Who'd have thought that aol would be on top of this??!

Chris

wrote on March 28, 2006 11:43 PM

My personal choice is plain text every time but marketing managers are always asking for it to look cooler. Not, I may hasten to add because of a potential uplift in sales, but because they get to stick a nice picture into the monthly report.

Jezza_J

wrote on March 31, 2006 12:27 AM

I've just changed company where I am now enjoying the delights of Bogus Notes 6.0 and have been tasked with building HTML campaugns. By using css I have managed to get the email rendered correctly but am still seeing issue's with displaying of images.

I have had varoius people tell me that Notes 6.0 will not display images, can anyone confirm this before I spend hours trying.

In addition, if it can support images, can anyone point me in the right direction as to how to do this......

Wendi

wrote on April 27, 2006 1:05 AM

Lotus Notes will display images and I found an excellent article of steps you can take to ensure that images are displayed. We tried it here at our company and it solved an issue they've been having for ages that even Lotus Notes support couldn't help them with. Check it out HERE!

Thanks for this great resource - it's been a valuable source of information for me in trying to create HTML email campaigns that works across most if not all platforms. :)

Jezza_J

wrote on May 4, 2006 8:44 PM

Thanks Wendi, this is great stuff...

cwilson

wrote on May 5, 2006 3:55 AM

How to fix CSS in Outlook:

My company is sending out HTML emails using inline CSS (these emails are dynamically generated through a website). The recipient of the email will then forward the generated email to their customers.

The problem we were coming across is that when they were forwarding the emails with Outlook, it was stripping the CSS (background images). The solution we found was to go into Tools-Options-Mail Format and unchecking the "Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to edit email messages" option. Now the table backgrounds display correctly.

This will allow you to keep the CSS in emails that are forwarded (or sent in general)

Clare

wrote on May 12, 2006 6:07 PM

That is very important. But did you hear about the last CSS in HTML emails???

cwilson

wrote on May 14, 2006 1:45 AM

No. What are you referring to?

sheepi

wrote on May 15, 2006 3:10 AM

Thanks for all, the ZIP file too. But, what can I do with a PHP? I can see it in Dreamweaver and the IE. You forgot to tell us newbies how to put this into my Outlook to try a test email. Attachment doesn't work. Copy, paste doesn't work. You forgot to tell how to use the ZIP file.

Dave Greiner

wrote on May 15, 2006 8:21 AM

Sheepi, sign up for a free account and you can test your modified zip file for free.

Stephane Gregoire

wrote on May 15, 2006 10:54 PM

Hi!

Thanks for this article. and thanks to ben scott for the position of the style tag in the body.

Now, the new Yahoo delete the body tag!

Aled

wrote on May 16, 2006 12:00 AM

Hi,

Great article! Managed to convince my boss to stop nagging me to get the HTML emails looking better in gmail with your bit about it.

Thanks!

cwilson

wrote on May 27, 2006 12:48 AM

Sheepi: If you are trying to have a PHP file run in Outlook it won't work. PHP, like all server-side languages, requires a web server that converts the code into something useful, like HTML. If I'm understanding you correctly, you'll have to come up with another solution.

Nocturnal

wrote on June 1, 2006 3:04 PM

Any idea if there is a way to have Outlook use a specific style sheet to render all incoming HTML e-mails? If anyone knows, could you shoot me an e-mail at nocturnal@REMOVEsupz.net? Thanks!

Stas

wrote on June 2, 2006 7:42 PM

"Any idea if there is a way to have Outlook use a specific style sheet to render all incoming HTML e-mails? If anyone knows, could you shoot me an e-mail at nocturnal@REMOVEsupz.net? Thanks!"
NO ideas:(

Stas

wrote on June 2, 2006 7:46 PM

But I know man who can help us

Yaron

wrote on June 5, 2006 1:02 PM

Thanks for this very informative info everyone.

Does anyone know if there's a way to create a clickable button (Form button, Table cell, etc) in an HTML email without having ESPs or clients strip out the code. I'm using "onClick" javascript and it gets blocked (dead button).

HTML Help Guy

wrote on June 10, 2006 11:48 AM

I think some HTML emails have definite legitimate uses.

The spam problem is so rampant, however, that's it's hard for many to overlook.

but that's a very informative article and a good read.

Craig Hoffmann

wrote on July 25, 2006 3:07 AM

My first post to any board - I have an HTML email that a freind created for me that I send to my cycling buddies to alert them to our weekend rides. The email was created on a PC. Now that I am 100% mac, when I forward the email and then try and edit, the email formatting is pretty messed up. Is there an easy fix as I don't understand most of the direction you give in the posts above. Thank you...Craig.Hoffmann@mac.com

Scott Haines

wrote on August 4, 2006 5:45 AM

I have been reading over everyone's posts and I think that in general HTML based email is slowly becoming a thing of the past, people are going to need to begin the slow and ugly process of upgrading ideas and processes to today's standards. Although most email clients don't render the CSS emails perfectly, think about how many email clients won't show anything at all including images, this is an ugly battle because of Spam filters and Serious Junk Mail filters, if we continue to fight the good fight as designers and programmers we will always lose to about 45% of people in our email marketing. We have to accept this as inevitability, it is like a designers fight against Internet Explorer, with all of the new standards being laid down by the W3, we have microsoft years behind, so I guess in the same way, we as designers will always suffer the wrath of companies that don't realy on standards and yet rather on what will get the next release out quicker and for the least amount of money. newfront

Crystal

wrote on August 10, 2006 12:59 AM

Great info. Thanks to everyone who commented. As usual, differing standards make our jobs a pain in the rear, but what can you do? :)

GonabesJohn

wrote on August 15, 2006 6:47 AM

My company is sending out HTML emails using inline CSS (these emails are dynamically generated through a website)

Kel

wrote on August 17, 2006 3:20 AM

Just an update re: Eudora Mac currently in beta testing for an update to version 6.x. (Also to note, Eudora 7 for Mac IS due to arrive eventually...) The current version of Eudora Mac 6.x adds a menu item to view html emails in a browser (Safari being the default, under 10.3 and higher), which works fine. Otherwise Campaign Monitor and MailBuild emails (with or without a text version) generally render as rich text with images inline. There is no real css positioning support (hence the need to view in a browser) and many folks I know keep Eudora's images turned off by default.

I expect Eudora's next Mac version 7 to be "decent" to html emails as they suggest Eudora will use WebKit for both display (and Authoring).

Hope that helps.

Pawel

wrote on September 23, 2006 6:15 AM

Nice article.
And what with clients using thunderbird, not an outlook?

Fafo

wrote on September 25, 2006 4:58 AM

In my little test with CSS, Hotmail present a rare behavior in his interface:

www.clowngroup.com.ar/test/hotmail.jpg

If you change the table properties for display:none, Hotmail interface disappear!
Somebody knows what happens?

Code:
**********************************************************

Test2 email

body{background-color: #E4E4E4;font-family: sans-serif;}
p{font-size: 0.75em;}
a{color: #ff6600;text-decoration: underline;}
table{border: 1px solid #333;}
tr{background: #B1B1B1;}
td{border: 1px solid #333;}
i{font-weight: bold; color: Green;}

HTML/CSS in email

This is an example paragraph test.

Table:

Text A1
Text B1

Text A2
Text B2

**********************************************************

Fafo

wrote on September 25, 2006 5:01 AM

Sorry, the original code is here: www.clowngroup.com.ar/test/test2.html

Lee

wrote on October 27, 2006 12:31 AM

From what one of my colleagues tells me, Lotus will support background images on the Body tag using styles, e.g.

rahim haji

wrote on November 14, 2006 11:19 AM

Hi All,

i am running a PHP site with the mail() function, however it seems that users with hotmail accounts can not get the emails sent from the site, there include registration emails, forgot passowrd emails, order emails and newsletters. does anyone have any ideas on how to get around this?

any help would be greatly appreciated.

rahim

raz

wrote on November 14, 2006 11:21 AM

i also need help with hotmail issues and yahoo, we are working on http://www.webtrendz.co.uk, http://www.toysgiftsgadgets.com and http://www.pleaseure2me.co.uk

we can not seem to send emails to yahoo and hotmail users, the emails do not even reach the spam filters.... pls help

Charlton

wrote on November 21, 2006 5:10 AM

I have downloaded the example zip file, extracted on Mac OSX. It is real good looking in Dreamweaver MX 2004. But I am wondering how am I suppose to do with entourage email system, how can I import the html page with good layout into the email?

Thanks

Kel

wrote on March 7, 2007 3:46 AM

Interested in seeing an update to this post cnsidering the new Outlook in Vista...

kalechi

wrote on April 10, 2007 3:43 AM

Lotus Notes: it uses IE for the rendering (until R8) so blame MS. Release 6.5 & 7 do a decent job at formating html emails. I found tabled based email design worked the best. images that are passed as a url work better then embedded which sometimes get pulled and added as attachments.

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