We published a full guide to designing emails for web-based email clients some time ago. However here is a simplified guide to the do’s and the do not's.

Hotmail

  • Globally defined <BODY> references such as VLINK or LINK will not work apart from BGCOLOR
  • CSS must be outside the <HEAD> tags as everything inside the <HEAD> tags is stripped
  • Try to put the closing </HEAD> on its own line. We have seen Hotmail sometimes fail to pass this when on a line with other text. When this happens Hotmail thinks that everything is in the <HEAD> tags and therefore you end up with a blank email

AOL

  • The latest versions of AOL mean you can get away with most standard HTML
  • Special characters in plain text format can be problematic so use the HTML entity instead

Yahoo

  • The main issue with Yahoo is again the globally defined fonts and colours for text and links

In the next few weeks Emailcenter will be adding an “Inbox Preview” option to Maxemail so users can see at a glance how the email renders in each of their email clients.

 

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