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Since the rise of Internet Explorer, web designers have had to test their designs across multiple web browsers. No one likes it, but we've all copped it on the chin, written a few hacks and moved on with our lives. After all, 3 to 4 browsers aint that bad - and they finally seem to be getting their act together.

If Internet Explorer is the schoolyard bully making our web design lives a little harder, then Hotmail, Lotus Notes and Eudora are serial killers making our email design lives hell. Yes, it's really that bad.

Inspired by the fantastic work of Xavier Frenette, we decided to put each of the popular email environments to the test and finalize once and for all what CSS is and isn't supported out there.

Today we’re highlighting a great looking monthly newsletter sent by Mom Advice, a popular and useful resource for all the Moms of the world.

The newsletter is simple - it does a few things and does them very well. Most importantly, the content is engaging and very well written. The email includes three great articles, interesting sites of the month and other articles their target market should find interesting.

The colors and clean design looks great and is nice and consistent with the Mom Advice web site. They’ve also managed to slip in a link to the web version and a reminder about getting into the users address book to reduce spam filtering and encourage images to be displayed by default.

Designer:  Ryan Clark  |  See the complete design

While we make it very easy to export your unsubscribed and active subscribers out of your subscriber lists, itís always been a challenge to extract that data on a per-campaign basis.

We just pushed an update live that now allows you to export any part of the Recipient Activity Report. To refresh your memory, this is a pretty sweeping report that lets you access information on recipients who:

• Opened the campaign
• Did not open the campaign
• Clicked a link
• Did not click a link
• Unsubscribed

Now you can export any one of these reports into a Comma Separated Values (CSV) or tab delimited text file with the click of a button. This one's been pretty high on the wish list for lots of customers, so we hope you find it useful.

One of our customers recently spotted a strange and very annoying Hotmail bug that modifies the appearance of your email.

If you include the word News in your campaign followed by a colon, so News:, Hotmail will automatically convert this into the following JavaScript link.

javascript:ol(‘News’);

When you think about it, this term can easily appear in tonnes of emails. Can anyone say Latest News:? The worst part is, clicking it will take you to a Hotmail 404 error page.

We assume Hotmail is doing some kind of conversion thinking this is the news: protocol for newsgroups, but this doesn’t seem to actually work anyway.

We’ve been in touch with Hotmail about his issue, so hopefully it’s something they resolve soon, but in the mean time, avoid using News: anywhere in your email content if you’re sending to Hotmail recipients.