I’ve been programming newsletters for the company I work for during the past couple of weeks and I was begining to think that HTML newsletters would ‘require’ tables.
First of all thanks for the pointers on css e-mail, i thought i was gonna have to use font tags & all that stuff..
Hotmail seems to strip out bacground-images, by changing url(“whateverFile.jpg”) to nourl(“whateverFile.jpg”) which is of course very annoying indeed, as everything else was going so well…
any ideas for work araound’s (dare i say hacks?)
persoonally i like a plain text email,
but well,
isn’t this new technology jolly exciting?!
This is the same thing that got me in a rage when I attempted to locate a decent webmail interface for a client. They didn’t want to pay for a totally custom peice of webmail software. I couldn’t give them a pre-made solution of what they wanted. So, I bit the bullet and started writing a webmail interface from scratch. 100% fresh.
So I started a project called TerraMail.
The idea? Create a webmail engine that would do the honorable thing and mess with the emails themselves as little as possible while obeying ALLRFCs and standards.
The result? I can now view every HTML based email that I’m sent AS IT WASINTENDED! The solution? IFRAMEs. The entire system is designed to be as flexible as possible.
Please forgive me if anone finds it offensive that I’m bantering my own software here, but I feel that letting yall know that there IS a proper solution out there would be highly relevant. :)
We have just finished version 0.2 and are cleaning it up for a proper development preview release. It works for basic email tasks such as reading and making plain text replies. I hope to have a few pages online soon detailing what TerraMail is capable of, our design philosophies, future capabilities, and a demo.
The curect version supports custom interface templates so you can integrate the system seamlessly into just about any website. It also supports an arbitrary IMAP backend connection for the storage of your emails.
A couple of the features planned for (and under development right now) TM 0.4 include completed MIME suport for outbound emails. Replies as attachment, replying to ANY part of an email, an address book, and some basic interface options.
We would also love to hear from everyone about what they want from a webmail interface. What do you like? what do you need? what do you hate? :) Please let me know so that I can make TerraMail be what everyone really wants from an webmail engine!
(Sorry I didn’t reply sooner to this comment on page 6 by Jeff)
Don’t bother with multi-part:
*) Some mail clients, especially on *nix text-based systems don’t deal with multi-part.
*) Why bother – if you put a textual version as a big html comment, then the first thing people will see is the text, not a large quantity of hyper-text markup
*) Definitely don’t use multi-part in Outlook or similar if they mime encode all of the images into the message – it’ll just make your email bigger, and if there’s one thing I hate… ;-)
Reading the rest of the discussions – it really comes down to – if you want to use HTML then follow many of the tips in this list as many of them help – if you don’t then don’t. You need to think about your target audience – which mail clients are they likely to use… are they technically savvy enough to switch off Javascript, etc.
Oh, and don’t forget that when SP2 for Windows XP comes out the default image download setting for Outlook Express will be to not download images (as recent Outlook 2003).
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Marguerite
I’m coming to web design after years in print design, where you can rely on ‘what you see is what you get.” So trying to do the email newsletter I am working on is quite frustrating, and trying to find info on whether you can use CSS with it has been next to impossible.
I use Adobe GoLive, and people on the forum there just say “don’t use CSS for email.” Nevertheless, I checked a lot of the email newsletters I get and they all seem to reference CSS.
Not being a developer, I’m not sure I can implement the advice in this article, but I appreciate it anyway.
The heated debate about plain text vs. HTML email is also very interesting, partly because as a non-techie I didn’t even know it existed. I like HTML emails for newsletter-type stuff because they look more like something printed on paper, and are easier to read. A long plain text email (like I receive from Graphics.com) is too much work to read because you can’t quickly scan to see if you are interested in anything. Good design/layout is not just pretty—it is useful to the reader, no matter what medium it’s in.
I think the average Joe is used to seeing sophisticated web sites, and is coming to expect sophisticated-looking email from businesses. A professional look is important because it says something about the sender and their product or service. I bet the average non-techie user isn’t thinking about the “behind-the-scenes” types of things the experts here know and think about.
Future email users like my kids are growing up taking all of this stuff totally for granted. They’re IMing lots of people at once, surfing and gaming online, and generally being raised on a high level of graphical communication. They can’t write an email without loading it with animated cartoons from smiley central. My pre-teen kids don’t have them, but how many teens are carrying around cel phones with cameras in them? Does anybody really think this crowd is going to demand plain text email?
Thanks to everyone for some very interesting reading!
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Dave Lindberg
Great article and thread[s]. Thanks for the encouraging facts and strategies.
We’re redesigning our promotional email campaign—sent out to over 600m subscribers weekly.
As we’re working to integrate CSS into our HTML offering, our preliminary delivery tests look great for all domains but two: BellSouth and EarthLink. The results aren’t about whether the styles were stripped out or not, but that the email itself never got through the ISP to any recipients.
In each case, our historic delivery rate runs at 100%; with the CSS test, delivery dropped to 0% for these two ISPs; all other ISPs retained full delivery rates. The test email contained CSS styles embedded within the body.
Curious to see if anyone has either experienced similar results, or can offer a clue/hypothesis regarding the cause of this anomaly.
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Anne
I’ve read with interest the comments from people who complain about HTML e-mail. In all the vitrol it occurs to me that most are missing the fundamental point: user choice.
If I go to a site that gives me a choice between plain text and HTML e-mail then I get to decide as the subscriber. Folks that happily choose to have HTML e-mail sent to them should not be subject to the whims of e-mail client programmers. That would be like having a government representative read the newspaper to you, censoring as he went along.
If I want HTML e-mail I should get it displayed, as much as possible, the way the designer intended.
Now, if we can just get AOL to even think about standards, e-mail, web, or otherwise, I’ll be a happy geek.
100 Reader Comments
Back to the ArticleJocelyn
Thank you very much for this article.
I’ve been programming newsletters for the company I work for during the past couple of weeks and I was begining to think that HTML newsletters would ‘require’ tables.
and y
First of all thanks for the pointers on css e-mail, i thought i was gonna have to use font tags & all that stuff..
Hotmail seems to strip out bacground-images, by changing url(“whateverFile.jpg”) to nourl(“whateverFile.jpg”) which is of course very annoying indeed, as everything else was going so well…
any ideas for work araound’s (dare i say hacks?)
persoonally i like a plain text email,
but well,
isn’t this new technology jolly exciting?!
Brian Wolfe
This is the same thing that got me in a rage when I attempted to locate a decent webmail interface for a client. They didn’t want to pay for a totally custom peice of webmail software. I couldn’t give them a pre-made solution of what they wanted. So, I bit the bullet and started writing a webmail interface from scratch. 100% fresh.
So I started a project called TerraMail.
The idea? Create a webmail engine that would do the honorable thing and mess with the emails themselves as little as possible while obeying ALL RFCs and standards.
The result? I can now view every HTML based email that I’m sent AS IT WAS INTENDED! The solution? IFRAMEs. The entire system is designed to be as flexible as possible.
Please forgive me if anone finds it offensive that I’m bantering my own software here, but I feel that letting yall know that there IS a proper solution out there would be highly relevant. :)
We have just finished version 0.2 and are cleaning it up for a proper development preview release. It works for basic email tasks such as reading and making plain text replies. I hope to have a few pages online soon detailing what TerraMail is capable of, our design philosophies, future capabilities, and a demo.
The curect version supports custom interface templates so you can integrate the system seamlessly into just about any website. It also supports an arbitrary IMAP backend connection for the storage of your emails.
A couple of the features planned for (and under development right now) TM 0.4 include completed MIME suport for outbound emails. Replies as attachment, replying to ANY part of an email, an address book, and some basic interface options.
We would also love to hear from everyone about what they want from a webmail interface. What do you like? what do you need? what do you hate? :) Please let me know so that I can make TerraMail be what everyone really wants from an webmail engine!
Webziggy
(Sorry I didn’t reply sooner to this comment on page 6 by Jeff)
Don’t bother with multi-part:
*) Some mail clients, especially on *nix text-based systems don’t deal with multi-part.
*) Why bother – if you put a textual version as a big html comment, then the first thing people will see is the text, not a large quantity of hyper-text markup
*) Definitely don’t use multi-part in Outlook or similar if they mime encode all of the images into the message – it’ll just make your email bigger, and if there’s one thing I hate… ;-)
Reading the rest of the discussions – it really comes down to – if you want to use HTML then follow many of the tips in this list as many of them help – if you don’t then don’t. You need to think about your target audience – which mail clients are they likely to use… are they technically savvy enough to switch off Javascript, etc.
Oh, and don’t forget that when SP2 for Windows XP comes out the default image download setting for Outlook Express will be to not download images (as recent Outlook 2003).
Marguerite
I’m coming to web design after years in print design, where you can rely on ‘what you see is what you get.” So trying to do the email newsletter I am working on is quite frustrating, and trying to find info on whether you can use CSS with it has been next to impossible.
I use Adobe GoLive, and people on the forum there just say “don’t use CSS for email.” Nevertheless, I checked a lot of the email newsletters I get and they all seem to reference CSS.
Not being a developer, I’m not sure I can implement the advice in this article, but I appreciate it anyway.
The heated debate about plain text vs. HTML email is also very interesting, partly because as a non-techie I didn’t even know it existed. I like HTML emails for newsletter-type stuff because they look more like something printed on paper, and are easier to read. A long plain text email (like I receive from Graphics.com) is too much work to read because you can’t quickly scan to see if you are interested in anything. Good design/layout is not just pretty—it is useful to the reader, no matter what medium it’s in.
I think the average Joe is used to seeing sophisticated web sites, and is coming to expect sophisticated-looking email from businesses. A professional look is important because it says something about the sender and their product or service. I bet the average non-techie user isn’t thinking about the “behind-the-scenes” types of things the experts here know and think about.
Future email users like my kids are growing up taking all of this stuff totally for granted. They’re IMing lots of people at once, surfing and gaming online, and generally being raised on a high level of graphical communication. They can’t write an email without loading it with animated cartoons from smiley central. My pre-teen kids don’t have them, but how many teens are carrying around cel phones with cameras in them? Does anybody really think this crowd is going to demand plain text email?
Thanks to everyone for some very interesting reading!
Dave Lindberg
Great article and thread[s]. Thanks for the encouraging facts and strategies.
We’re redesigning our promotional email campaign—sent out to over 600m subscribers weekly.
As we’re working to integrate CSS into our HTML offering, our preliminary delivery tests look great for all domains but two: BellSouth and EarthLink. The results aren’t about whether the styles were stripped out or not, but that the email itself never got through the ISP to any recipients.
In each case, our historic delivery rate runs at 100%; with the CSS test, delivery dropped to 0% for these two ISPs; all other ISPs retained full delivery rates. The test email contained CSS styles embedded within the body.
Curious to see if anyone has either experienced similar results, or can offer a clue/hypothesis regarding the cause of this anomaly.
Marleen
Hi,
Anyone familiar with reading html mail in Yahoo webmail? Seems that alle the urls’s to images are replaced by a yahoo url..
Thanx
effisk
I can’t believe you went thru all this. It must have taken you ages. I’d rather send a plain text message, with maybe a URL.
wez
does anyone here know how to send html formatted emails from osx/macintosh?!? This should be possible?
WEZ
Anne
I’ve read with interest the comments from people who complain about HTML e-mail. In all the vitrol it occurs to me that most are missing the fundamental point: user choice.
If I go to a site that gives me a choice between plain text and HTML e-mail then I get to decide as the subscriber. Folks that happily choose to have HTML e-mail sent to them should not be subject to the whims of e-mail client programmers. That would be like having a government representative read the newspaper to you, censoring as he went along.
If I want HTML e-mail I should get it displayed, as much as possible, the way the designer intended.
Now, if we can just get AOL to even think about standards, e-mail, web, or otherwise, I’ll be a happy geek.