Creating HTML Email

Matcha Design - Tuesday, September 6, 2011

When building a web page, one must always keep in mind the differences between the way browsers implement (or don't implement) web standards. When building emails, this is much, much worse. For starters, there are no specific standards regarding what should and shouldn't be allowed to display in an email, and client support varies very widely. There are also many people using various webmail clients, and these people don't all use the same browser.

Many of the practices frowned upon in web design are a necessary evil when it comes to emails. For example, using tables (and nested tables - *shudder*) to determine layout. Positioning styles are not widely supported in some of the major email clients (including Outlook 2007/2010). So if you want a consistent layout, take a trip to 1995 and build it with tables. Another major rule-breaker is inline styles instead of style sheets. Most notably, Gmail doesn't allow any