html email design

[Deleted User 234324]

Hiya,

anyone recommend some tools/programs to design/create html emails, i have a large form that is submitted via email and would like to get the output email looking as good as possible rather than just a list of form elements/values.

Thanks

 

[GravyMonster]

Anything program that can build webpages can build emails, butyou'll probably have to amend some of the code to adhere to the rules of HTML emails.

Basically:
- Don't use background images
- Don't use external CSS stylesheets, keep css to a bare minimum and use it inline where you need it.
- No divs, you MUST use tables for layout

 

[cjmUK]

Anything program that can build webpages can build emails, butyou'll probably have to amend some of the code to adhere to the rules of HTML emails.

Basically:
- Don't use background images
- Don't use external CSS stylesheets, keep css to a bare minimum and use it inline where you need it.
- No divs, you MUST use tables for layout

Yeah, I wrote a spamming application for our marketing people. I trained them to write their own press releases for the website, so when I tried to train them to write HTML emails they were confused - all the basic good practice that I showed them for the web-pages was gone and I was telling them to produce the crappiest HTML for the emails.

Basically, your html and styling need to be self-contained. You can reference external images, but don't rely on them being available to the recipient. Many companies block or filter the images, and if they don't, most decent email clients block them (at least initially). You get much better results if you embed images in the emails (look-up CIDs), but this has the obvious cost of increasing the footprint of the email. The other problem with CIDs is that it is harder to embed using common clients; AFAIK, Outlook can't, and probably Thunderbird as well. Pegasus handles them, as do various others. Because I'm coding my emails, I obviously have a lot more freedom.