If you want to send someone an email with some text in it there are quite a few different ways you can do it. The main differences are the ways the text is packaged up in MIME entities to be sent. text/plain This is the simplest sort of text you can send. If you send a simple email with many desktop mail clients, this is what you get. You can’t include images, you can’t choose fonts...
A bit of a refresh of a post from 2011: Six best practices for every mailer. I still think best practices are primarily technical and that how senders present themselves to recipients is more about messaging and branding than best practices. These 6 best practices from 2011 are no longer best, these days, they’re the absolute minimum practices for senders. If you can’t manage to do...
One of the more frequent questions I get that I can’t answer is how to design a good email. Design is just not my strong point and outside actually getting the HTML right, what an email looks like doesn’t have a whole lot to do with delivery. It was pointed out to me today that the nice people over at Mailchimp have a resource page for designing emails. It’s a good mix of...
Over the weekend I noticed a new CSS framework aimed at email rather than web development, “Antwort“. This isn’t the first or only framework for email content, but this one looks simple and robust, and it allows for content that doesn’t just adapt for different sized displays but looks good on all of them. The idea behind it is to divide your content into columns, magazine...
People get into all sorts of details when talking about best practices. But so much of email depends on the type of email and the target market and the goals of the sender. It’s difficult to come up with universal best practices. I’ve said in the past that I think that best practices are primarily technical. I don’t believe there is a best frequency or a best time to send mail...
This morning, someone asked an interesting question. Last time I worked with the actual HTML design of emails (a long time ago), <head> was not really needed. Is this still true for the most part? Any reason why you still want to include <head> + meta, title tags in emails nowadays? There are several bits of information in the <head> part of an HTML document that can affect the...
CampaignMonitor blogged today about an email they sent out that triggered the Thunderbird “this might be a scam” filter. After a bit of tweaking, we discovered that Thunderbird systematically throws up this alert when it sees a URLs in your HTML email copy. In this case, we had made the mistake of adding the following line: If you would like to support the National Wildlife Federation...
Steve and I were talking this afternoon about HTML in email. He wanted to know what headers I looked for in the HTML portion of an email. A good question, as I’ve seen everything from a full doctype declaration through to just <body> tags.. All of them seem to render OK in various mail clients so I don’t spend too much time worrying about the specific HTML header elements. I do...
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