A couple of days ago I wrote an article on Creating a HTML Newsletter using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) I mentioned that different email clients render CSS differently and trying to make things look the same in all client was just about impossible.

Well The Email Standards Project is trying to do something about this, which is great for us designers and developers.

“Our Mission is to drive the use and support of web standards in email, working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently.”

The site is a great resource if you are interested in developing an email marketing campaign for your business or you are a designer trying to design a newsletter. If your business or blog has an email newsletter that goes out on a weekly, fortnightly, or monthly bases then there are golden opportunities for you generate some income by making some ad space available on your newsletter. Using HTML Emails are ideal for this!! Make sure you do not miss the boat and grab a piece of the action.

Jupiter Research projects that e-mail marketing spending will grow from $1.2 billion in 2007 to $2.1 billion in 2012 So getting it right will be very important.

Let’s delve a bit deeper into a few popular email clients to see how they rate. Now what the Email Project does is send an email “Acid Test” similar to that of the Web Standards Group to different clients to test a limited number of CSS properties constructed with proper markup.

GMAIL

Now Google’s Web Based Email Client GMAIL is becoming extremely popular so I thought I would have a look at the finding of the Projects Acid Test. Now the Acid Test does not include any inline CSS because inline CSS is not fully standards-based. Gmail only supports inline CSS therefore nothing from the Acid Test was supported.

What was interesting to read was even if Gmail supported embedded styles in the head of a document, it strips all IDs and classes from the source. Rendering it useless.

Microsoft Outlook 2007

Ok let’s have a look at this client. I use this at work and know first hand that it has fairly poor CSS support. For starter it doesn’t support Margins, Padding and Floats. These are VITAL to any design and without them things start to become difficult. Here is a list of thing that Outlook 2007 either does not support or doesn’t do a good job rendering Border Color/background-color, Descendant-selectors, Font family/size/weight/style, Font inheritance, Font-family names with quotes, Line-height, Varying link-colors.

If you want to check out other Email Client and how they faired with the Email Standards Project Acid check then visit the website

If you are a Blogger OR run an Internet Business that has an Email Newsletter and would like to OUTSOURCE the design of your and distribution of it then get in contact with me and I can take that workload off your shoulders so you can worry about blogging and or your business.

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