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1. Jurgen
   March 30, 2006 9:36pm

   Great post, it has always been sort of a grey zone with web based email clients. This makes it a bit more clear!

2. Jon
   March 31, 2006 12:08am

   Excellent resource! Thanks for putting the time into simplifying this for us.

3. Chris Harrison
   March 31, 2006 1:12am

   Thanks for sharing this David! Definitely saving this for future reference. I appreciate you putting the time into compiling all of this for everyone.

4. Josh Williams
   March 31, 2006 2:21am

   Excellent. This is confirmation that we are not insane. Great resource!

5. Terry Evans
   March 31, 2006 2:37am

   Awesome. Thank you very much!
   Now I’ve got some real armour for heading into the HTML email battlefield. Although clearly you can’t have enough.

6. Colly
   March 31, 2006 3:12am

   Thank you, thank you, thank you… and thank you.

   Just what I need now that a certain record company are constantly badgering me to create mailouts that look like the website. Was having huge probs with web-based email, so this is bloody perfect.

7. Shane
   March 31, 2006 9:15pm

   A fantastic resource for anyone designing CSS-based e-mails. 

   I’ve bookmarked the page, and I’m sure I’ll be back.  Thanks a lot for your efforts.

8. Asif
   March 31, 2006 10:10pm

   Great work ...

9. Simon
   April 1, 2006 2:41am

   Excellent piece. Explains a lot of things about email I have received that didn’t look correct! And may also explain some porr results on certain mails I have sent.

10. Amrit
    April 1, 2006 8:32pm

    Nice post! Sending elegantly formatted emails is always a problem especially with people using all the email clients in the world. Thanks for sharing this.

11. Darren
    April 2, 2006 1:23am

    I’ve been looking for this type of resource for a year now. Good lookin’ out!

12. David
    April 3, 2006 2:35pm

    So if I leave out the block from the head and only place it in the body the support should be about the same if I had placed it in both areas? Only now hotmail will see it?

    I just coded a css email and hotmail showed nothing. Not even a bare bones version.

    I’m also going to send google a nice little letter telling them to get their act together with gmail. I use gmail and love it but it really should support css. The folks over at google are plenty smart enough to have figured it out by now.

    Thanks for the nice article!

13. Quentin Ellis
    April 4, 2006 3:09am

    Great post, as the others say, thank you for the hard work.  many questions answered

14. Arnold
    April 4, 2006 2:10pm

    Can u post some sample program about CSS

15. Dave Greiner
    April 4, 2006 11:52pm

    Arnold, if you’re looking for a sample CSS email template, the one available in this article is a great place to start.

    David, that’s right, placing the <style> element in the body is the way to go and won’t have any negative effects, except for Eudora, but as we illustrated that’s not really a problem because of its dismal CSS support.

16. Marina Krutchinsky
    April 5, 2006 4:25am

    Thank you very much for combining all data into a single article. It makes an excellent reference and removes most of “test and trial” and plain old guesswork.  Most helpful!

17. AMC
    April 5, 2006 9:34am

    As a long-time, die-hard Eudora user, I agree that anything beyond the simplest markup is totally ignored ... but keep in mind that Eudora users can choose “File > Open in Browser” to see HTML e-mails properly formatted. Don’t know how many do so, but for important e-mails or ones with interesting links, I usually do.

18. AMC
    April 5, 2006 9:44am

    in case I wasn’t totally clear ... in Eudora, looking at an opened e-mail message that’s basically unreadable due to HTML markup (CSS or otherwise), the user chooses Open in Browser from the File menu. Eudora creates a temp .html file in file:///private/var/tmp/ and the message is shown is the user’s default browser, mark-up renders beautifully. This is the only way I can read my e-mails from AmEx ...

19. Bill Burns
    April 6, 2006 2:37pm

    This is fantastic, David. Thanks for putting the work into this. Instant reference bookmark…

20. ParadiseFound
    April 13, 2006 6:24am

    What version of Lotus Notes client was used for this test? Just interested…

21. Ed Brill
    April 13, 2006 6:41am

    this can’t possibly be a current version of Lotus Notes.  Without disclosure as to what version, this seems like an incomplete analysis.

22. Niki Lin
    April 13, 2006 8:32am

    Great work guys!

    I was using css in my mails without knowing this could be such a problem for all those different mail agents. I think I’m going to point this out in my class. Again it’s sad to see that the battle for consistency among utilities is going on…

23. Dave Greiner
    April 13, 2006 10:53am

    Hey Ed,

    We tested the Notes compatibility on the latest version we could download from the IBM site. This was version 6.5.4, which was apparently released on March 27, 2005.

    If there is a more recent version of Notes that we can have access to, I’d be more than happy to replicate the test and update our findings.

24. Alex
    April 13, 2006 8:38pm

    That¥s really great, david. Thanks for your fantastic work.

25. Patrick Corcoran
    April 14, 2006 4:36am

    Nice work.  Well researched.

26. tribaldo
    April 17, 2006 1:42am

    Just say, thnx a lot! This guide is very useful for web developers. ;)

27. Joe
    April 19, 2006 1:16am

    Nice job on this article

28. Lachlan Hunt
    April 19, 2006 4:51pm

    If Eudora doesn’t support any properties whatsoever, how were you able to determine that it supports the type selector?  How about making all of the test cases you used available so we can see the results for ourselves, including clients you haven’t tested?

29. Lachlan Hunt
    April 20, 2006 11:48am

    With regards to putting the style element in the body instead of the head to support Hotmail, what happens if you just omit the start- and end-tags for the head and body elements?  That is perfectly valid in HTML 4.01 (and earlier).

30. Dave Greiner
    April 21, 2006 11:24am

    Lachlan, that’s a very good point and one that we overlooked. I just double checked the results and Eudora changed the font-size for a H1 we were testing and we mistakingly took that as it supporting the style we declared for that H1. Pretty silly oversight really.

    Here’s the test HTML and CSS we used for our testing. If you have any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

    In regards to omiting the head tags from the document, that’s something we’d have to test, I haven’t tried that one before.

31. Ellen de Graaf
    April 21, 2006 8:31pm

    You indicate that Hotmail supports background-images, but it doesn’t unfortunately :(
    I noticed Hotmail removes any CSS rule that uses a url().

32. Damien Buckley
    April 22, 2006 10:19am

    Hotmail supports background images but you’ll need to put the style tag inside the body tags, not in the document head - last time I checked anyway.  I still think you’re better off putting your CSS in the head of the doc and letting Hotmail fall back to unstyled content - its more reliable for the minority who use it.

33. Ellen de Graaf
    April 23, 2006 1:04am

    I did put the style inside the body tags, but it didn’t work. I totally agree with you, but clients huh ... They tell me a lot of our target audience still uses Hotmail (here in Holland), unfortunately :(

34. Bob Mixon
    April 24, 2006 2:15am

    Very, very nice!  Great work and I appreciate it.  I am linking to this page from my Site!

35. Enrique
    April 24, 2006 4:29am

    Genial.

36. loopion
    April 24, 2006 8:26am

    I think is the most useful analysis I’ve ever seen !

    Thanks a lot !

37. Spencer
    April 26, 2006 12:44pm

    Wow, absolutly perfect info.  I deal with HTML/Text (Multi) email on adaily basis.  This is oging in my Links bar right now!

38. RickRanger
    April 29, 2006 5:36am

    An outstanding research effort!  The depth and detail of your findings is exceptional.
    Well done.

39. Lachlan Hunt
    May 1, 2006 3:27pm

    I noticed with a recent HTML mail I was forced to build (despite my desire to send only plain text e-mails) that Thunderbird will only render in quirks mode, regardless of the DOCTYPE used.  So my beautiful, standards compliant work of art that renders beautifully in Firefox, has bugs in Thunderbird as a direct result of quirks mode.

40. Donna Zukowski
    May 3, 2006 6:52am

    I have a question about meta tags. I read somewhere that email programs ignore them. Should they be included? thanks

41. Donna Zukowski
    May 3, 2006 8:45am

    I’m also wondering is there anyway to keep on top of HTML specifications to lessen the amount of HTML winding up in SPAM?

42. Ben Richardson
    May 3, 2006 11:32pm

    

    Hey Donna, that’s correct, email clients don’t care about meta tags. As for your HTML code affecting your SPAM scoring, content is usually the offender as opposed to code - here’s a little more information on this.

43. Gunther Bohnert
    May 8, 2006 6:53pm

    Great work - thanks a lot. I’d like to mention one more Mac Client: PowerMail by CTM Development. Haven’t checked your test parameters with this one yet. Maybe I should…

44. Jon Harvey
    May 10, 2006 2:16am

    If you comment each line of style within the body tag Lotus Notes will render them… Weird but true… Just thought I’d add this little pearl

45. Mark Wyner
    May 10, 2006 2:42am

    

    Beatiful work, folks. You put in some serious time to arrive at these charts and the web community is therefore indebted to you. We applaud your efforts.

46. Amber S.
    May 10, 2006 6:23am

    Finally - one place to go to for CSS & email info. When I created my company’s newsletter using CSS a year ago, you don’t know how many articles, blogs, and other sites I read trying to find out what was supported (along w/ a million test emails sent to my Hotmail, Gmail, and Outlook accounts)! Thanks so much for doing all this testing!

47. Danny Foo
    May 10, 2006 1:31pm

    The charts definetely going to help when trying to figure out why certain properties aren’t working.

    A very big thank you. :)

48. Blaze
    May 10, 2006 11:32pm

    This is incredibly useful, thankyou very much. Maybe in the future you can update this with more popular clients etc as well? Cheers

49. just debra
    May 19, 2006 4:58pm

    Double-Kudos to you! Thanks for such a great work.

50. alakazarm
    June 3, 2006 2:10am

    You should have added Thunderbird to the mac tests too…

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