More on HTML newsletters

I’ve been reading up on how to make good html newsletters, and the biggie is making sure they degrade well.  As with web browsers, different email clients will render things differently.  And since there are many more email clients than web browsers, it’s not very practical to test how every single email client will render the newsletter.  Instead, it’s good to know some generalities and design around them.

Some rules I’ve found are:

Make sure that if none of the CSS or images load, it’s still a decent newsletter.  

Many clients will, at best, not load images by default (some will not load images into the email at all), so it’s important to not have the content of the newsletter dependent on the images.  

Some email clients (particularly webmail clients) will prevent CSS from being applied, since it might cause conflicts with their site’s look and feel.  Inline CSS styles won’t likely be ignored, but anything more general than that might or might not render in the user’s inbox.  As a result, we have to veer away from cleaner, more standards-based coding and instead depend on tables for laying out the newsletter.