Boy what a difference 18 months can make! In my last Vitamin article I was singing the praises of standards based email and encouraging the use of CSS in your email designs. While the browser market has continued to strive for better standards support, a major player in the email industry has unfortunately done the opposite.
With the release of Outlook 2007 earlier this year using the Word rendering engine instead of Internet Explorer, my recommendations just don’t make the cut any more. I’ve decided to revisit my original suggestions and bring them more in line with today’s baseline. I’ve also had a good look at the feedback and comments from the original post. Getting your email to look good is only one piece of the puzzle, so I’ve dedicated the second half of this article to recommendations on how you can improve the chances of your emails actually getting delivered.
Some things change, some stay the same
While the best way to code your email might have changed, a number of key email design fundamentals haven’t changed a bit. My original article focused on the importance of designing for images being turned off and making sure your design looks good in the preview pane. Not only are these notions still relevant, they’re more important than ever with more and more email clients using preview panes and blocking images by default.
In the last 18 months we’ve seen the new version of Hotmail, known as Windows Live Hotmail and the new Yahoo! Mail sport a preview pane layout that blocks images by default for unknown senders.
In terms of image blocking, it’s safe to assume that at least half of your recipients will receive your email without any visible images. Because of this, it’s still important to ask your recipients to add you to their contacts/safe senders list when they subscribe (and in each email subsequent email you send), which often results in your images being turned on by default.
On top of image blocking and preview panes, my other recommendations on essential content, the importance of testing and key things to avoid all still apply. If you haven’t done so already, make sure you check out these suggestions.
Learning to love inline CSS
You might ask why an update to only one particular email client might change my entire position on using CSS in email. That one’s easy. Outlook commands more than two thirds of the business email market. Admittedly, not everyone will have upgraded to the 2007 version so far, but many more will. Add the imperfections of Hotmail and Gmail to the mix and it becomes difficult to justify sending a garbled email to so many of your subscribers.
No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater though. CSS still has an important role to play, albeit in its non-semantic inline form — but it works. For example:
<p style=”font-family:Arial; font-weight:bold;
font-size:11px; color:#060;”>Look ma, no semantics!</p>I know many of you probably cringe at the thought of this, but if you’re looking to get any kind of design consistency across the major email environments, it’s your best option. Not all CSS is supported though, you’re actually working with a limited subset. Here’s an outline of what CSS is and isn’t supported in 14 of the most popular email clients.
For a solid level of support in Outlook 2007 and Gmail, as well as other major clients, stick with inline CSS
for the following properties:
- background-color
- border
- color
- font-family
- font-size
- font-style
- font-variant
- font-weight
- letter-spacing
- line-height
- margin
- padding
- text-align
- text-decoration
- text-transform
Using tables for basic layout
If you’re looking to add columns or any kind of significant design element to your email, then unfortunately structural tables are the only way to go. Float and width are just too poorly supported at this stage to consider completely CSS-based layouts. Don’t get too ahead of yourself though, just because you can use tables doesn’t mean pixel perfect design will be easy.
Just like CSS, different email clients handle tables differently. When you start to add in a bit of cell padding and maybe nest a table or two, things can get ugly fast. Again, there are some basic table guidelines you can stick to so you can at least maintain your sanity.
- Don’t go nesting crazy. As soon as you start nesting more than one table deep some email clients really start to choke, especially older clients like Lotus Notes. Even Outlook handles the padding in a nested table differently to that of the parent table.
- Instead of specifying your table width in the <table> tag, specify the width of each cell in the <td> tag. You’ll find this gives you more consistency across the board.
- Make sure you don’t mix cellpadding with padding via inline CSS. Some email clients really struggle with this, so stick to basic cellpadding and no CSS for the best results.
Here’s an example of some simple table code that will render most consistently across the major email clients. Notice the lack of width in the table tag and no CSS.
<table cellspacing="0"
cellpadding="10" border="0">
<tr>
<td width="120"></td>
<td width="480"></td>
</tr>
</table>The takeaway from this really is to keep things simple, which I think is a good thing for email anyway. Avoid large images and complex layouts and instead focus on making your content readable no matter how your subscribers are viewing your email.
Looking ahead
While the current lack of standards support in the email world is discouraging, complaining about it isn’t going to get us anywhere. We need to start being vocal to email client developers and encourage them to embrace web standards when rendering HTML emails. It’s a big job, and that’s why we recently launched the Email Standards Project — a brand new initiative that will hopefully broaden the communication lines between designers and those responsible for how email clients render HTML email. Check it out and help spread the word if you think it’s an important issue.
Getting your emails delivered
Even though achieving consistency in how your emails are rendered is a challenge in itself, you’ve still got a long way to go before it actually arrives in your subscriber’s inbox. The world of email deliverability has changed a lot in recent years. Originally, content was king. As long as you weren’t blacklisted and your email content didn’t include lots of “spammy” words, then you had a good chance of getting delivered. Today however, ISP’s and spam filtering technology has got a whole lot smarter and more aggressive.
Who is sending the email is becoming more important than what the email says. ISPs are doing this by watching their customers reassign habits and use of the “Mark as spam” button, and then tying that back to the sending domain and IP address. If a subscriber is regularly opening your email then you should be in the clear, but if a decent number rarely open your email and mark it as spam then you might not make the inbox much longer. Known as your sender reputation, it’s the most important factor in getting your emails delivered today. Just like the real world, having a good reputation ensures trust, and if ISP’s don’t trust you, you’re in trouble.
This introduces a new challenge to anyone sending reasonable amounts of email. No longer is getting permission enough to assume your email will be delivered. If it’s not relevant and exactly what the subscriber asked for, you run the risk of them marking your email as spam. It’s a delicate but extremely democratic
system; your ability to deliver email truly is in your subscriber’s hands, so treat them with the respect they deserve.
Ensuring a good sender reputation
There are three major metrics most ISPs use when calculating your sender reputation, each of which are easy to maintain provided you use some common sense. These metrics are your spam complaint rate, the percentage of email you send to addresses that no longer exist, and finally the number of spam trap addresses you send to. Spam traps are generally email addresses created by ISPs and anti-spam companies to lure spam by never actually signing up to anything, but publishing them in spots where email harvesters will pick them up.
By following the simple guidelines below, you can ensure these three metrics never become an issue and
tarnish your sender reputation.
- Get their permission — File this one under “so obvious it’s almost not worth mentioning”. Unless you have clear, explicit permission from everyone on your list then please don’t bother sending anything to them. There are no shades of grey here either — it’s like someone “sort of” being pregnant. If they don’t remember giving you their permission, they’ll mark your email as spam and shoot your sending reputation in the foot. This is also the only way to guarantee you won’t ever be sending to spam trap addresses.
- Set expectations and stick to them – At the time of obtaining permission, whether it’s through a subscribe form on your site or someone giving you their details offline, be sure to tell them when they’ll be hearing from you and what they should expect to receive. If someone subscribes to your quarterly newsletter and you start sending to them weekly, you can expect spam complaints.
- Be relevant and interesting — This one can be hard to get your head around because it seems so easy. Of course my emails are relevant and interesting! But are they really? Before you hit the send button, try and put yourself in your subscriber’s shoes and honestly ask yourself if it’s something you’d be interested in hearing about. It’s getting more and more common for subscribers to mark your email as spam even if they originally opted-in, purely because it wasn’t relevant enough.
- Make it easy to leave — One particular mistake that I see quite a bit is making it hard for your subscriber’s to unsubscribe from your list. The mentality is that by hiding your unsubscribe link in a small font somewhere in the footer then maybe people won’t bother. Today, if a subscriber wants out and can’t immediately see the unsubscribe link, I guarantee the “Mark as Spam” button will be their next best choice. If anyone does click your unsubscribe link, don’t make them jump through hoops to get off your list either. A single-click is all it should take.
- Process all bounces — Every time a mail server receives an email for an address that no longer exists or is temporarily unavailable, they’ll send you back what’s called a “bounce”. This is a simple email that often explains why the email couldn’t be delivered and comes in two distinct flavours. A “hard bounce”, which is a permanent error meaning that address is no longer in use, and a “soft bounce”, which is a temporary issue such as a full mailbox. The moment you get a hard bounce back, you should immediately remove that address from your list. While they are often temporary, I recommend keeping track of all soft bounces. As soon as an email address soft bounces 3 times, consider it permanent and remove them from your list. Your sender reputation will thank you for it.
Keeping track of spam complaints with ISP feedback loops
Because keeping your spam complaint rate low is so important, a number of the major ISPs have feedback loops set up where they’ll send you an email letting you know whenever anyone marks your email as spam. This is incredibly useful — you can immediately remove anyone who complains from your list, and you can also quickly gauge if your content is starting to become irrelevant. Here are some brief instructions on the major feedback loops you should register your sending IPs with if you’re taking care of email delivery in-house.
| Overview | What you’ll need to supply |
| Windows Live Hotmail (Hotmail/MSN) The Hotmail Junk Email Reporting Program is a must to register for and includes all spam complaints from Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Mail. |
Company and domain information Your sending IP addresses Your sending practices Support for Sender ID email authentication (explained below) |
| Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services A great way to monitor your deliverability to all Hotmail and MSN accounts. You register your IP’s and they tell you if there are ever any delivery issues. |
Company and domain information Support for Sender ID email authentication (explained below) |
| AOL Includes all spam complaints from desktop and web-based AOL accounts. |
Company and domain information Your sending IP addresses |
| Yahoo! Mail Yahoo! doesn’t currently have a page dedicated to their feedback loop, but you can apply to be registered by emailing them. |
Company and domain information The Domainkeys signing key you use for each domain (explained below) A signed agreement sent back to Yahoo! |
| SpamCop.net Once you create an account and log in, you can add the IP range to be monitored here. |
Company and domain information Your sending IP addresses |
Most ISPs use the standard Abuse Feedback Reporting format when sending you these complaints, which often involves stripping any personal information about who made the original spam complaint. Because of this you’ll need to make sure you include some kind of identifier (like a subscriber ID) in the original email so you can confirm who made the complaint and remove them from your list.
Embracing email authentication
Email authentication is a set of important technologies that add a much needed accountability layer into the emails you send and can instantly improve your deliverability to many of the major ISPs. By setting up authentication for all of your sending domains, you can prove an email is coming from you and isn’t fraudulent. These days it’s becoming a must-have for anyone sending a decent amount of email.
Authentication works by adding some simple records in the DNS for each sending domain you use. For example, if you send email from news@abcwidgets.com, you’ll need to add your authentication records into the DNS for abcwidgets.com. Right now there are two main authentication systems that you should be using:
| Authentication method | ISP’s that support it |
| Sender ID A Microsoft technology based on the SPF standard that involves adding a record to your DNS indicating which mail servers are allowed to deliver mail on your behalf. You can create your Sender ID record in a few minutes using this wizard. |
MSN/Hotmail AOL Juno NetZero United Gmail |
| DomainKeys and DKIM DomainKeys is a Yahoo innovation that involves adding a record to your DNS containing a public key, and then adding a corresponding digital signature to your mail headers that matches the corresponding private key to the one In your DNS. DKIM is a newer standard combining DomainKeys and another standard. If possible, I recommend supporting both. |
Yahoo Gmail Earthlink |
Keeping your own house in order
So, now that you’ve got a good sending reputation and are ensuring it remains under control by monitoring spam complaints, what else is left? Here’s a checklist of some of the more important finer points that you’ll also want to ensure is covered in your email infrastructure:
- Reverse DNS — It’s crucial to ensure you have RDNS set up for every IP you deliver email from. RDNS involves a receiving mail server looking at the IP address your email is coming from and then checking to see if there is a registered domain associated with it. It’s a requirement for most receiving mail servers and whitelists, so don’t overlook it.
- Valid mail headers — The information contained in your mail headers is crucial to a receiving mail server deciding if they will accept your email. Make sure you’ve got a valid return-path (where bounces are sent), the correct MIME-Version and encoding information, DomainKeys/DKIM signature and your IPs in the received lines have RDNS set up. I’d also recommend checking out the list-unsubscribe header currently supported by Windows Live Hotmail.
- Throttling your delivery speeds — different ISPs have different maximum speeds you can send at. Once you start to exceed these speeds, they’ll consider you a spammer and start blocking you. Make sure you set a reasonable speed limit on the number of connections and messages you send per hour so you don’t tread on any ISPs toes. From experience most ISPs will allow a few hundred simultaneous connections and 25 or so messages per connection.
- Stay off blacklists — While your sending reputation continues to become more important, you still need to make sure you don’t appear on any major blacklists. Even if you’re following all the guidelines I’ve mentioned above, a rare blacklisting can happen to the best of us. I recommend checking the free Spam Database Lookup provided by DNS Stuff as often as you can. You can also apply to be whitelisted by ISPs such as AOL and Yahoo.
- Monitor all abuse accounts — By default some anti-spam systems (and people) will send any spam complaints to abuse@yourdomain.com. Make sure it’s set up and is actually going to someone responsible for your sending reputation. If a complaint is made, resolve it immediately. Don’t forget to register your abuse accounts with abuse.net.
As you’ve probably gathered, nothing about email marketing is a piece of cake. Whether it’s getting your email delivered or making sure it looks great once it arrives. If you’re using an Email Service Provider like my company Campaign Monitor to deliver your emails, all of the technical challenges I mentioned above will be covered for you automatically. Nevertheless, the technical side is only a small part of your email reputation — the crucial ingredients of permission and relevance are up to you. If you are responsible for delivering email from your own servers however, I hope that by sharing many of the lessons I learned the hard way over the last few years you can get your emails delivered, and keep your sanity in the process.
[…] The Email Standards Project and its accompanying article on Vitamin Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered. […]
Great article - especially the authentication information.
Very informative article and it’s great to see the Email Standards Project is a reality. Concerning using inline CSS to code your emails, I’ve found Premailer to be a very useful tool for that.
Very nice article, its just what i needed, thanks
Algunos consejos de maquetación para correos electrónicos…
Consejos para la maquetación de un correo electrónico para no llevarnos sorpresas desagradables cuando lo visualicemos en diferentes clientes de correo así como webmails….
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered […]
[…] The release of Outlook 2007 earlier this year (using the Word rendering engine instead of Internet Explorer) makes building html emails even more horrible. This is the first good link i’ve encountered so far with css and html tips how to ensure your HTML emails look great and get delivered. Tags: CSS, Email, HTML […]
[…] Author: David Greiner | Original article […]
Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered…
[…][…]…
Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered…
[…]Saved By: Matt King | View Details | Give Thanks[…]…
This email standards deal, proposal, thingy, (I’m not sure what to call it) is an interesting idea. It does in fact make it sounds like Web Standards, but for email - when in fact they’re completely different. I imagine the whole premise behind this is for folks who ‘want’ HTML in their emails. Are there any statistics (based off a large amount of users) showing what users prefer. HTML emails vs Plain text? Regardless, this is all very brand new to me and I’m probably asking stupid questions.
If anything, the chart found on the email standards website looks more like Yahoo!’s graded browser support, but for email clients…. nothing to do with standards really, at all. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of having such a chart. Would it be all that silly to include another column that describes how well an email client’s spam detection is? Poor, Fair, or Good? For example, Gmail sits in the “poor” category, but has the best spam filtering. I’m willing to bet it’s partially due to what it has to do to content of each email to filter out these spam messages; resulting in lesser support for full HTML and CSS support. At this point you’d have to ask yourself, “Do I want better looking emails, or lots of spam?”
And FYI, there is no secret handshake ;)
[…] Along with the release of email-standards.org, comes out a new article on ThinkVitamin, entitled “Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered” Spread the word! […]
[…] Το ότι οι e-mail clients, on-line και off-line, δεν τα πάνε καθόλου καλά με τα web standards είναι γνωστό εδώ και πάρα πολύ καιρό. Το ερώτημα όμως είναι γιατί κάποιος δεν έχει κάνει κάτι γι’ αυτήν την κατάσταση. Οι προσευχές κάποιων λοιπόν εισακούστηκαν, και για τον παραπάνω λόγο δημιουργήθηκε ένα νέο project, το Email Standards Project το οποίο έχει σαν στόχο να βελτιώσει αυτήν την κατάσταση και να κάνει τα πράγματα καλύτερα για όλους, και για τους απλούς χρήστες, και για τους developers αλλά και για τους vendors των e-mail clients! Το συγκεκριμένο site προσφέρει πολλές πληροφορίες και αναφορές για όλους τους διάσημους e-mail clients (off-line και on-line), όπως για παράδειγμα τι CSS κανόνες υποστηρίζουν, ένα e-mail ACID test, προτάσεις για βελτιώσεις σε κάθε e-mail client καθώς και πολλές άλλες ενδιαφέρουσες πληροφορίες. Η όλη προσπάθεια είναι πολύ οργανωμένη και αξιόλογη ενώ ήδη πολλοί vendors έχουν πραγματοποιήσει πολλές από τις προτεινόμενες βελτιώσεις στα προϊόντα τους! Η συγκεκριμένη κίνηση έπρεπε να είχε ήδη γίνει, αλλά κάλιο αργά παρά ποτέ. Περισσότερες πληροφορίες μπορείτε να βρείτε στο επίσημο site του project, ενώ στο Vitamin μπορείτε να βρείτε ένα πολύ καλό άρθρο πάνω στο συγκεκριμένο θέμα και την σωστή δημιουργία ενός newsletter. Φυσικά μείνετε συντονισμένοι και εδώ γιατί ετοιμάζω και ένα post/tutorial πάνω στο θέμα… […]
[…] Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered, by David Greiner is a great resource, discussing issues such as spam lists, what you can request from some ISPs, etc. […]
You mention making the unsubscribe link a single click. However, I used to do that. When people clicked unsubscribe our system removed them from our database and sent a confirmation telling them they had been successfully unsubscribed. However, then we started receiving emails from people who were upset because they were not unsubscribing but were getting unsubscribe confirmations. The only thing we could figure out is that some systems must somehow automatically trigger a click on hyperlinks. We have since gone to a two-step process. First they click unsubscribe in the email itself, then they get to a web page where they must click again to confirm. It seems to have solved our problem of false unsubscribes but we really want to do things right, so if anyone else has any other suggestions….
[…] Most email readers don’t support external style sheets. That means you if you link to your CSS files within the heads section of your HTML newsletters, recipients will likely receive a mess of text and images. Learn to love inline CSS instead. […]
Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered…
David Greiner explains what you need to do to ensure that your emails not only look great in today’s email clients but also actually make it to where they’re going….
A while back I made a strong template that seems to work in every client circumstance I could find.
http://commadot.com/the-holy-mail/
What do you think?
Glen Lipka
[…] 20 ) Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered - David Greiner explains what you need to do to ensure that your emails not only look great in today’s email clients but also actually make it to where they’re going. […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered (tags: html email spam) […]
[…] Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered David Greiner has an article up on Think Vitamin which covers some of what I covered, but goes more into detail on actually getting the emails delivered if you are sending them yourself. […]
Hey guys, thanks so much for the kind words, great to hear many of you are finding the article of some use.
John, good call about Premailer, I agree it’s a great tool that does it’s job very well.
Thanks for your thoughts Dustin. Just to clarify though, these are in fact exactly the same thing. We’re talking about a subset of basic W3C standards here, not a new set of standards just for email. We’re more or less saying HTML and CSS should be rendered in the email client just like it does in the browser (with some obvious exceptions like scripting and rich media). This is already the case in the majority of clients, but some need to make improvements.
Because this is a subjective thing, it’s difficult to measure the same as browser share or flash penetration. What I do know is it’s the default format for most of the popular email clients, and it’s the preferred format for many sending email newsletters because in most cases it generates the best return.
Of course, as I recommended in my previous article, whenever you send in HTML format, you should always include a well written plain text alternative.
I can certainly confirm that’s not right. If the email client is displaying the message with poor standards support, that more or less proves it has nothing to with it being filtered because you’re reading it in your inbox, not the spam folder As I stated in the article, spam filtering is much more about your sending reputation than it is about the content, especially the code itself.
You need to understand that the Email Standards Project has nothing to do with the text/HTML debate or curbing spam, it’s got everything to do with bringing all email clients around to supporting web standards when rendering HTML emails. It’s certainly not going anywhere, so why should it be broken?
I have heard scattered reports of this phenomenon Clint, but at this stage it appears to be a very rare problem. Of course, the 2 step process is certainly fine, as long as you don’t make your subscriber jump through hoops, which you’re not.
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered David Greiner explains what you need to do to ensure that your emails not only look great in today’s email clients but also actually make it to where they’re going. (tags: advice article authentication clients compatibility email html css design spam newsletter best-practices) […]
[…] Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered - Como o nome diz, este artigo nos d dicas para formatao de e-mails e maneiras para termos certeza de que os usurios os recebero de maneira correta. A parte mais interessante a listagem de propriedades CSS suportada pela maioria dos clientes de e-mail. […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered Extremely comprehensive article on creating and delivering HTML in 2007. (tags: css development email marketing spam) […]
[…] Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered […]
[…] Other stuff: Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered CSS Drop Down Menu Comments (0) […]
[…] Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered (tags: css webdev webdesign tutorial email) […]
[…] Skaitiniai savaitgaliui: How to Program Google Android Relational Division Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered Product pages: so much suck, so easy to fix vim ir python […]
[…] Html e-posta hazırlarken CSS kullanımında neler dikkat etmeliyiz. Bağlantı […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered (tags: email html css design) […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/ensuring-your-html-emails-look-great-and-get-delivered email standards project http://www.email-standards.org/ […]
[…] Vitamin takes a look at how to ensure your html emails work and look good. With the restrictions from Outlook 2007 Vitamin takes a look back and changes some advice to do with emails. This really is an article full of good information and has some interesting advise on best practices and spam avoidance thrown in with some great design notes. […]
[…] So what’s a person to due in the mean time–structural tables and inline CSS, of course! That’s what! So barbaric and so 1999! Here is a tutorial on what HTML/CSS you can use across multiple email clients. […]
[…] “David Greiner from Vitamin explains what you need to do to ensure that your emails not only look great in today’s email clients. This article is really well written and useful, you should not miss it if you would like your clients / readers can read your emails properly.” […]
[…] Thinkvitamin.com has written an extensive article that focuses on the following areas: […]
[…] David’s article “Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered” at Vitamin […]
HTML Email Design (and Deliverability)…
Today, I came across a great article at Vitamin. David Greiner, of Campaign Monitor, summarized all the content I have been tracking into one article….
[…] Vitamin Features > Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered. good tips if you ever need to run an email campaign or newsletter. […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered (tags: Email) […]
[…] David Greiner de Vitamin explica que se necesita para asegurarte que tus emails, no solomante se vean lindos y bien, si no también, que lleguen a su destino. Que se vean lindos es solo una parte de toda la idea y proyecto de mandar un email. […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered […]
[…] Click here to read more on Vitamin Bookmark to: […]
On top of image blocking and preview panes, my other recommendations on essential content,
[…] De allí que esta noticia afecta a millones de usuarios, que podrán ponerse al tanto, leyendo a David Greiner en Ensuring you HTML emails look great and get delivered, donde explica lo que se debe hacer para que un email llegue a destino, sin ser bloqueado como spam. […]
[…] En cualquier caso, en Think Vitamin tienen un checklist para asegurarse de que los e-mails se envian bien… Sería mucho más fácil y no harían falta los checklists como este si hubiera un estándar!!! […]
[…] I ran across a good article today on Vitamin that pertains to sending HTML emails, (Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered). This article pertains to HTML Email Standards and Viewability in standard Email Clients. This reminded me that I haven’t really blogged about Pleth’s Email Campaign Service that we offer so I figured this would be a great opportunity… […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered (tags: WebDesign CSS Design Email WebDev DNS Howto HTML Layout Mailing Newsletter Outlook Presentation Gmail Programming Resources Spam SysAdmin Testing Tips Tools Tutorial Tutorials) […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered Guide to HTML email creation, gosh it still sucks, thank goodness for the email standards project! (tags: css howto tutorial) […]
I do A LOT of emails at my job and I use a whole bunch of inline CSS. One of the things I do it put styles on the tags. even font styles, so then i don’t have spacing issues when dealing with tags. Usually my tags contain: font-family, font-size, color, line-height, and sometimes padding but not usually since different clients view them differently.
I also ALWAYS specify the width of cells, ans even when the cell is empty, i find it useful to add a transparent GIF just to make sure the cell holds and nothing collapses on itself.
Emails are always built with tables , and I try not to nest more than 2.. otherwise funky stuff starts to happen.
[…] 20 ) Ensuring your HTML emails look great and delivered - David Greiner explains what you need to do to ensure that your emails not only look great in today’s email clients but also actually make it to where they’re going. […]
Notas acerca de HTML y su correcta visualización en e-mails…
Cada vez es más popular el envío masivo de correo electrónico por parte empresas, particulares y cualquier de nosotros que quisiera llegar a un público específico o a la mayor cantidad de gente en general.
Esta labor …
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered Good overview on the ugly code you have to write to make sure html emails looked good in every email client. (tags: campaignmonitor email htmlemail) […]
[…] Asegurándonos que nuestro contenido se vea correctamente en los diferentes servicios de e-mail Buen artículo y listado de tips para sacar el máximo provecho del uso de HTML en el contenido de los e-mails. Seguir leyendo. […]
[…] clipped from www.thinkvitamin.com […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered - […]
[…] Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered […]
[…] HTML-mail är något som många webbutvecklare kallsvettas/förbannar sig över. På Vitamin finns dock en utförlig guide som kan hjälpa en på traven. […]
What about accessibility?
Every single resource I can find about html emails only talks about using PX instead of EM for font size.
But in outlook express - this means NO SCALING - this means NOT ACCESSIBLE CODING.
HOWEVER - if you use EM - better check the look in GMAIL’s new version - it will be really TINY - they have screwed things up a bit there.
What do you think please!>?
hey - sorry - i wasn’t trying to be obnoxious there -
i not at all an expert about accessibility issues, or even html email…just wanting to get better - - i meant to put it more in terms of a question, but it seems kinda off-base when i read it back to myself…
i’ve been trying to build a decent newsletter using just em’s and make it look decent, and in my travels i was really happy to read your very helpful article.
anyway - if i may submit a helpful tip - as far as keeping your emails out of the spam bin - i think setting up a proper SPF record is a good idea…i’m just getting into that stuff but it seems pretty decent idea
I think it is very important to optimize e-mails and newsletter for conversion as well. I get so many e-mails where I always wonder what to do next. I often miss a clear call-to-action.
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered (tags: email html newsletter spam css webdesign compatibility) […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered (tags: compatability cross email html resource sitecheck) […]
[…] Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered (tags: email design html css) […]
[…] 18 ) Understanding Web Design - Terrific essay by Jeffrey Zeldman as he weighs in on the ’state of web design’ discussion that’s been circling around a number of blogs recently. 19) Creative Use of PNG Transparency - Everything you ever wanted to know about using PNGs in web development but were afraid to ask. Includes a trick to make alpha-transparency work in IE6, has a great example of how to add a watermark to photos without doing every singe photo separately and a lot more. 20 ) Ensuring your HTML emails look great and delivered - David Greiner explains what you need to do to ensure that your emails not only look great in today’s email clients but also actually make it to where they’re going. […]
[…] David Greiner from Vitamin explains what you need to do to ensure that your emails not only look great in today’s email clients but also actually make it to where they’re going. Getting your email to look good is only one piece of the puzzle, so he has dedicated the second half of this article to recommendations on how you can improve the chances of your emails actually getting delivered. This article is really well written and useful, you should not miss it if you would like your clients / readers can read your emails properly. […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered (tags: css design email marketing tips newsletter) […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered a great article to help you create email newsletters and make you less annoying. (tags: email newsletter spam articles) […]
Great article, It’s hard you send a graphic mail without landing in the spambox, thanks!
[…] Great general overview for HTML emails. LINK […]
Thanks for giving me the keys to avoid being spammed again. Been looking for this info. Thanks
[…] Think Vitamin: Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered […]
[…] Think Vitamin: Ensuring your HTML emails countenance enthusiastic and intend delivered […]
cheese mate, thanks for this very useful tips. we send a quite a number of plain html embedded emails to our clients. but as i said i is just plain html. now i will try to make it look a bit glamorous. cheers.
[…] Think Vitamin: Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered […]