HTML Emails

[dukelips]

what are the css tags that apply to html emails to yahoo,live,gmail,outlook.

margin is not supported in live. Pls help

[tedster]

Here's a great thread from the library: The Challenges of HTML Email [webmasterworld.com]. Note particularly the 5th post from Don_Hoagie

The thread is 5 years old but don't let that concern you - things move very slowly with email clients. In fact, Outlook dropped their internal rendering engine since then and went to using thw MS Word engine.

[dukelips]

Still the standards are poorly adopted for html emails.
Rule 1: NO Margin

[tedster]

the standards are poorly adopted for html emails

You said it. I think that concern for security has overwhelmed flexibility and progress.

But then again, email is the old man of the Internet - predating the web by decades and really going back to ARPANET. Email itself is so patched up by now that it probably needs a whole rebuild from the foundations up.

[Hoople]

Outlook has a number of version and variations vs Service Pack that someone took a LONG time to compile the variations on CSS aspect [campaignmonitor.com ]

Getting Outlook to send certain types of HTML is problematic, THE go to site for Outlook is [slipstick.com ] At first look that site might appear to have outdated tech notes. In reality Microsoft is slow to update the 'applies to [version]' on them. Most newly added support is carried forward until Outlook 2007/2010. The HTML rendering engine was changed. Use the first reference in the 1st paragraph to determine which is the case. The grade school math principle of least common denominator rules as to what works everywhere!

For Outlook making up 'Stationary' (a template) is a great time saver. Paste new content into new message and most times it works. As with any HTML message be sure to run them thru a SPAM check first to fine tune and issues it finds. See [emailexpert.org ]

[Lexur]

I try to make my emails as simple as possible so I use the old tags (FONT FACE=arial,freesans COLOR=#224455) to prevent HTML mail being distorted.
Anyway I test my templates in Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo (and being so simple, it not always run properly).

[sparklings75]

There are many rules to follow for html mail, because every mail client and html mail client have differents filters

So basically the mains restrictions are :

1/ Only embed CSS ( on elements style attribute, no css import or even in head tag )
2/ No head tag ( and body tag isnt required ) you can start with a div
3/ No fancy styling (align, float, etc). You have to use plain old tables
4/ No background-image (but images are allowed)
5/ No script of course
...

[dukelips]

What are the rules for sending mails to live and hotmail