Period Three Blog » Email Marketing Lessons Learned Issue 1: CSS or table/Inline-styles for your email messages

May242007

Email Marketing Lessons Learned Issue 1: CSS or table/Inline-styles for your email messages

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

We design and build a lot of HTML email message here at Period Three, A LOT… One thing we’ve learned over the course of time is that CSS support in web based email systems and desktop email applications is spotty at best. Not to mention now that Microsoft has said that it will be integrating Word’s HTML rendering engine into it’s newest iteration of Outlook instead of IE7’s. Ouch! Most of the time your emals will be viewed in Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail/MSN and GMail, so make sure an test the design out in all of them. It’s safe to assume that you should avoid entirely a pure CSS layout for your message and if you use it at all make sure it uses inline-styles. Here’s a quick list of email apps/clients and what they use (for now):

Yahoo! Mail = Supports CSS
Hotmail = Supports CSS
(if you put the style element in the <body> not the <head> of your HTML document)
Gmail = Supports only Tables and inline CSS
Outlook and Outlook Express = Supports CSS
Lotus Notes = Supports only Tables and inline CSS
AOL 9 = Supports CSS
Thunderbird = Supports CSS
Mac Mail = Supports CSS
Entourage = Supports CSS
Eudora for the Mac = Supports only Tables and zero CSS

In many cases the <style> element gets removed completely from your message HTML, so inline-styles are the safe way out.

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