A few years ago, it seemed to be accepted wisdom to avoid HTML formatting in favor of plain text when sending notification e-mails to users, because a) not all e-mail readers supported HTML and b) HTML-formatted e-mail was more likely to land in the user’s spam folder.
Are these arguments still valid today, or are HTML e-mails fair game now?
Any restrictions I should keep in mind?
EDIT:
I'm planning to use only a small subset of HTML -- bold, italic, links, lists and tables will be sufficient.
Making html email work correctly everywhere is a very hard task (each client seems to support a different small subset of html / css etc.).
If you decide on sending html email, be sure to send multi-part mime messages (both html and plaintext versions in the same email) so clients which don't understand html can just render the text correctly.
I believe HTML is the way to go these days, all clients I have worked with use HTML to render their emails, but to keep it safe, you should send it both formats, HTML and plaintext. With .Net its simply create an AlternateView.
Here are a couple of resources that I have found very useful
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/19/design-and-build-an-email-newsletter-without-losing-your-mind/
http://www.mailchimp.com/kb/article/how-to-code-html-emails/
Prepare your email HTML according to email templates. You can find many services for preparing and testing your html email. Just Google around.
And for sending part, prepare a plain text version of your message, and send the email as multipart. You can use an open source library like Zend Mail or an online app like MailChimp. In this way, if the client app doesn't support HTML, it's shown the plain text version instead.
Related
I am using telerik reporting tool to generate reports in different formats, .pdf,.html, .doc, .txt etc. Some of our client's email server doesn't sport attachment in emails so I want to embed the .html report to my email body instead of attaching it as attachment so user can see report content directly and copy report content. But when I append .html report to the email body it doesn't render in proper format as it was. Is there any online tool or plugin which convert the normal html to email template friendly html? Or how can I validate that this page is going to render fine as email body or not if not then why not? which tag should I remove or replace etc.
I have tried this online tool
but its not working, still got dirty html in email.
There are a couple questions in here, which I will do my best to answer as someone who is comfortable coding emails.
Regarding HTML Email validation, there really isn't a good option.
Since most email clients don’t follow web standards and there are no
email-specific standards in place, properly coded HTML emails will not
pass HTML validating because, if coded properly, nearly all of the
code within an HTML email is likely to be comprised of deprecated
elements.
source
You can use the W3C validator to catch unclosed tags and typos, but that's about it.
But it sounds like you're looking for a tool that converts webpage-friendly html into email-friendly html. Despite both using HTML and CSS, coding emails is quite different from coding the web. Unless the web-friendly HTML design is very basic (say, a series of paragraphs and images), chances are the webpage-friendly html would not bode well in email clients. (Sounds like you've already discovered this.)
Without knowing what these reports look like and what how they should display in email clients, I'm hesitant to give you specific suggestions. I don't know any tools that automatically make 'safe' email markup. If you're open to tweaking the email markup a little, here are a few guidelines:
Keep the design simple.
Use <table>s instead of semantic elements like <div> for layout.
Become familiar with what CSS is and is not safe to use in an email.
I have just found this nice validator (EmailLint - unfortunately hosting has lapsed). There are defined rules for e-mails and you can validate your e-mail against them.
I have what I thought was a simple task to do, that has now snow balled into something else. I wrote a simple python script that would generate simple customer notification over email in plain text using smtplib pretty simple.
Now when trying to make a more rich email, like those that Paypal,Amazon etc send, I run into some problems. Having read a question here and coupled with what I thought was a universal template I got from here I felt armed to complete my task.
However I keep reading about fragmentation and how various email clients don't support all sorts of tags and when I open it on my Hotmail client on Android it looks perfect but when I open the same email on chrome (WIN) on Hotmail it misses some buttons styling. Let me not even get started how it looks on Yahoo mails Android client (I know you are now wondering who cares who still uses Yahoo or Hotmail but a lot of people still do).
Where as Amazon and Paypal emails look consistent in styling across all platforms,clients and email providers. I can't find a simple resource that clearly describes away to make a truly robust way of serving html content on email.
Can someone share a resource of how to do this with python?
Please see if this is helpful to you.
http://mailchimp.com/resources/email-design-guide/
I programmed a HTML application form which I insert into my MySQL database.
After that i send the application form data as a HTML E-Mail to the applicant.
Does anyone know (responsive) HTML E-Mail templates which i can use for this?
I can only find templates for newsletters etc. I want to send the application
data in a "list" design
Forms in an HTML email have been a risky venture for a long time and still continue today. It places a security risk that some email clients flat out block interactivity with it (e.g. Outlook) and most others have some sort of warning or limited capability filter on them. (Campaign Monitor)
There is also speculation (but no real solid facts) that HTML forms can reduce deliverability to some ISPs.
It is recommended to send the recipient to a landing page to fill in a form there via their web browser where the security risk is greatly reduced and so are the restrictions and weird behavior that email servers can present.
If you were aware of all this and sending to only an audience that can receive and submit these no problem, I would recommend looking at this code style for your design - Hybrid Code
I wonder if it is possible to create multi-paged e-newsletter. I know that the email clients are in general very restrictive (for a good reason of course) so one has to use plain table-based html for design and even images download has to be manually approved not to mention scripts. But maybe...with the help of html5 or other advanced technologies it could be possible to include the additional pages to the attachement and use them somehow. What do you think?
Your best chances are creating "read more..." buttons that link to a webpage.
If you would want to have multipage newsletters, there are various options:
Frames
Iframes
Use of JavaScript
Unfortunately, all of these options are sent straight to the spambox.
Even if there would be a HTML5 tag or element-only option, eg. a slider, most e-mail clients won't support these new features for the next billions of years. Webdev's complain about IE, but e-mail clients are much, much worse.
Generally email only supports (x)html and limited css. Unlike the ever-evolving web, popular email clients like Outlook for example, are out of date (and using the MS Word render engine). Much of html5/css3 that is common web practice today, is not widely supported across major email clients.
The only options you have as a link to more, is to host the additional information online (a landing page is typical), or to use anchor links and have the additional information further down in the email. Anchor links aren't 100% supported however. You may get iframes to work in one or two email clients but it will not work in most.
Javascript or any other server or client side language is NOT supported in email.
Most of you probably know the following problem: You edit an HTML, view the result in your browser and happy with it.Then, you send it through different mail providers (AOL,YAHOO,GMAIL...), and discover that after going through their mail servers it may look
completely different (not to say worse) than you've expected it to. The view differs not only between what you see in your own browser before and after sending the HTML as an email, but between different email providers as well. A short "view source" will convince you that each email provider CHANGES (generically) the HTML.
My question:
A.I've heard there's an application allowing you to check how your html would look after going through each one of the US main email providers, so I can edit my html respectively. Can you tell me where I can find it?
B.Alternative ingenious solution? (less preferable..)
The only application I know which checks a lot of email providers is MailChimps' Inbox Inspector: http://www.mailchimp.com/features/power_features/inbox_inspector/. It sends screenshots of your email from several different inboxes. However, it's not free.
Alternatively, you can use appropriate HTML for emails, which will result in the same email in almost every inbox. Apprpriate HTML for emails are:
Use tables instead of divs
Use inline styles
Don't use background images
Do not float