Email Rendering Issues
One of the most time consuming aspects of being an email developer is making sure that the email you’re ‘quarterbacking’ is rendering correctly in each and every conceivable client available to the general public. In other words… just because it looks OK in Mac Mail does not necessarily mean that it will look the same for an end user retrieving their email via Thunderbird.
The only way around the temperamental conditions of some email clients (Lotus, I’m looking at you) is to test your message with as many clients that you have at your disposal. If you do run into rendering issues in clients such as Gmail or Hotmail, a nice reference guide can be located here from the fine folks at Campaign Monitor. They thoroughly cover which clients support such CSS elements as style & link and which ones don’t. According to the link above, Gmail is most uncooperative client, yet Yahoo! is the most lenient.
Additionally, Campaign Monitor states in their guide that there isn’t any one design approach that will guarantee consistency. Instead, you should take a couple of things into account.
- The consistency demands of your client
- The potential email environment of your recipients
- Business to Business
- Business to Consumer
Posted by MindComet on Jan. 08, 2007