The video below demonstrates this, but here is a summary of the key benefits of this additional editing option:

• Editable Regions – certain areas of the template can be restricted so they cannot be changed, helping you maintain brand guidelines and ensure code is not broken.

• Content Library – populate the Content Snippets Library in Maxemail with content and then this is all available to insert into your email with a couple of clicks. You can even integrate your existing website or product databases, so every product or holiday you offer is available as an item for you to drop in. This dramatically reduces the build time on an email.

• Drag and Drop Interface – move content around with point and click, rather than the unreliable method of copying and pasting.

However not without a significant issue for email marketers.

One of the first things we have noticed is the alignment of your email and some background colours are missing when using a user reads your email in Firefox, Chrome, Safari or any other browser which is not IE.

This is nearly 70% of Internet users according to w3schools.com

Here is an old versus new Hotmail example on an email:

Old version of Hotmail:

New version of Hotmail:

As you can see it looks like the email is now left aligned and the grey background has gone. What has actually happened is Hotmail will only display your email as wide as the maximum defined width in pixels – either from a table width in pixels or the width of the widest image – whichever is wider.

So if you have a containing table used to help set alignment and background colours at a width of 100% it won’t work. If your inner table which is set to a fixed width rather than a percentage of say 600 pixels then that is the width your entire email will be shown as.

So the background colour and alignment is as we defined but your 100% width table will only be 600 pixels wide and therefore none of it will be shown.

Why does it do this?

Essentially Hotmail has some code on the page which will always render the width of the email as the maximum fixed width you defined.

How do I fix it?

You could force the containing table to be say 900 pixels – but those viewing it in low screen resolutions or only a partial screen will not be able to see your full email. Indeed Hotmail even prevents you from scrolling to see these parts.

What you need to do is tell Hotmail to change it’s code and you can do that with a CSS reference. The items that restrict the width are much further up the page.

Simply put this CSS within your email and this will fix the issue:

<STYLE type=”text/css”>
.ReadMsgBody
{ width: 100%;}
.ExternalClass
{width: 100%;}
</STYLE>

This tells your browser to change the code that Hotmail uses to restrict your email width.
And to prove it works here is the email with the fix:

New version of Hotmail (Email Fixed):

Sign-up to our newsletter at the bottom of the page to learn more about these valuable insights as we find them.

The newest member of the Emailcenter team (Simon) talks about the main issues to consider when trying to get your marketing emails to render correctly in Outlook 2007.

This has generated a fair bit of talk between email designers, due to the notorious perceived failings of Outlook 2007′s HTML rendering, and whether this will be continued in Outlook 2010. There has even been a bit of a storm whipped up on Twitter, due to the aim of fixoutlook.org to send a rather loud message to the chaps at Microsoft.

As a quick recap, for Outlook 2007, Microsoft took the decision to use the HTML rendering engine (which reads the code and decides how to place elements on the page) from Microsoft Word, as this is also the system that is used to write emails within Outlook. Of course, this synergy between creation and display has obvious benefits for Outlook users, who can be sure of how their email is going to appear when it reaches its recipient (as long as they are also using Outlook!?)

However the problems arise when we realise that the rendering engine within Word has some serious failings (think: float and background-image), and in Microsoft’s own words, is detailed as supporting:

“a subset of the standard HTML 4.01 specification, [...] the Internet Explorer 6.0 HTML specification [and] a subset of the standard Cascading Stylesheet Specification, Level 1.”

So this means that designers of HTML email have a hard time getting emails to render as desired in Outlook 2007, not only with some features not displaying (such as background images and animated GIFS), but with attributes like font size, margin and padding having different effects from the behaviour expected from a standards-compliant web browser.

Of course, designers would like the opportunity of a new Outlook version to address these issues, and there was even a response from a senior member of the Microsoft Office team. He largely centred on the compatibility of sending and receiving Word-based emails within Outlook, but proceeded to write that there were no defined standards for HTML in email. True, the Email Standards Project doesn’t have any official standing, but surely the web standards that define HTML are enough!? Another developer in the Microsoft Office team thinks so, and has submitted an internal bug report to that extent, although he does not work directly on the Outlook project.

Many of the campaigners go too far in my opinion, by asking for the Internet Explorer engine to be used, as it was in versions of Outlook preceeding 2007. I would much rather see the Word engine improved to the point of complying with web standards. Of course, we only have to look at Internet Explorer to realise that wish would be an impossibility, but surely it would be reasonable to expect Outlook/Word to support the same feature set as the recently superceeded IE7?