Having done my fair share of HTML newsletters for clients – I have pretty much followed the same rule of thumbs you have outlined over the years after many hours of frustration and surprises! – it makes you feel dirty using <tables> for the task – but like you say, it’ really is the only way to get consistent output across the bulk of email clients.
Besides the markup side of things – on the actual email sending aspect people should also be looking at implementing SPFDNS records for their outgoing mail server domains, providing a text based equivalent of newsletter content in the same message (using multipart/alternative MIME types) and ensuring reverse IP lookups can be successfully done against their domains.
With HTML emails always rating high on the ‘spam-o-meter’ with most webmail clients (Hotmail being the notable standout here – their spam pass/fail filters are nothing short of pathetic IMHO) ensuring these checks above are in place will help in getting your message through to your recipients.
Peter Mescalchin
Superb article David.
Having done my fair share of HTML newsletters for clients – I have pretty much followed the same rule of thumbs you have outlined over the years after many hours of frustration and surprises! – it makes you feel dirty using <tables> for the task – but like you say, it’ really is the only way to get consistent output across the bulk of email clients.
Besides the markup side of things – on the actual email sending aspect people should also be looking at implementing SPF DNS records for their outgoing mail server domains, providing a text based equivalent of newsletter content in the same message (using multipart/alternative MIME types) and ensuring reverse IP lookups can be successfully done against their domains.
With HTML emails always rating high on the ‘spam-o-meter’ with most webmail clients (Hotmail being the notable standout here – their spam pass/fail filters are nothing short of pathetic IMHO) ensuring these checks above are in place will help in getting your message through to your recipients.