Questions regarding the use of iframes in email crop up from time to time. Whether it be to do with adding content from a site, or a ‘Like’ Facebook box, we figured that we’d finally do some thorough tests of our own and put the matter to rest.
So, what was the verdict? After testing an email with iframes across 24 major web, desktop and mobile clients, we found that the results weren’t particularly promising. As iframes can potentially link to shady or plain malicious content (like scripts), a lot of email clients just disable them.
Here’s a breakdown of which email clients display iframes, and which ones do away with them altogether:
| Client | Iframe displays? |
| AOL Webmail | No |
| Gmail | No |
| Windows Live Hotmail | No |
| MobileMe | No |
| Yahoo! Mail | No |
| AOL 9 | No |
| Apple Mail 3 / 4 | Yes |
| Entourage 2008 | No |
| Lotus Notes 6 / 7 | No |
| Lotus Notes 8 | Yes |
| Outlook 2000 | Yes |
| Outlook Express 6 | Yes |
| Outlook XP / 2003 / 2007 / 2010 | No |
| Thunderbird | Yes |
| Windows Mail | Yes |
| Blackberry | No |
| iPhone / iPad | Yes |
| Symbian S60 | Yes |
| Windows Mobile 5 | No |
| Windows Mobile 6 | Yes |
| Android (default client) | Yes |
| Android (Gmail client) | No |
Our advice: given the notably poor adoption of iframes, we seriously discourage you from using them. Even though this means that you can’t add a ‘Like’ box to your email, there are alternate ways to share your campaign on Facebook that you can consider.
