This is not ‘exactly’ a programming question, but it’s highly related. We are writing an app that sends out email invitations for a client (no, it’s not spam). Their designer gave us an HTML and CSS template to use which is fine. The problem is that it looks like crap in Outlook 2007 because Microsoft decided to use Word (of all things!) as the rendering engine for HTML in Outlook 2007. I want the client to understand that they should design a ‘compatible’ look and would love to be able to show some kind of statistics about what email clients are being used out there, namely that Outlook 2007 is growing in use.
Has anyone run across any white papers, web sites, studies that even come close to providing a view on this? I don’t expect census level accuracy, but something fairly credible would be good. Thanks for any help.
My understanding of the generally perceived best-practise on this, is is to code for the lowest-common denominator. There are plenty of email clients with enough use in-the-wild that aren’t great at rendering ‘modern’ HTML.
Firstly, aim to send your mails as a 2-part multipart mime message. An HTML part AND a plain-text part.
Secondly, try to avoid using CSS or positioned divs where possible. Use table-based layouts and inlined-styles. Preferably specifying as much of the style in HTML where possible.
Try to keep images as inline IMG tags, or as table/row/cell background attributes only.
The email world just isn’t anywhere near as up-to-date, and more importantly, far more diverse than the browser world. If you follow these simple rules, your life is going to be much easier than taking a more advanced approach and repeatedly tweaking it in order to get your content to render satisfactorally on enough of the common clients.