EOA Blog

Using Empty Table Cells in HTML Emails

Designers often use empty cells in tables to create ‘pixel perfect’ emails, but this method might not be as reliable as you had thought. We performed a number of tests to investigate empty table cells. Check out this blog post to review some of our research and to learn best practices.

Email on Acid the MSNBC Website of the Week!

JJ Ramberg starts the segment by guessing that a lot of her viewers use email to communicate with their customers and users.

We’re betting that she’s absolutely right, and we’d like to thank her for stressing the importance of pre-flight rendering and SPAM checks, as well as pointing out that EOA does more than provide screenshots, we provide insights into the discrepancies discovered.

3 Ways to Remove Unwanted Gaps Between Tables in Outlook 2007 and 2010

If you are trying to stack tables side by side or top to bottom, you might find Outlook 2007 & 2010 to be a bit, well… troublesome. If you are seeing unwanted gaps or spacing between your tables, you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, I’ll spare you the speech about Outlook and it’s infamous Word rendering engine and we’ll cut straight to the fix.

45 Reasons Why HTML Email Optimization Should Be a Priority

With a lack of standards for rendering HTML & CSS within the various email clients, email development can sometimes be difficult*.
(* Colossal understatement…)

Even with the use of an email boilerplate, tips, and tricks, it can be rough on any developer to try to account for the many combinations of DOCTYPEs, HTML elements, and CSS properties that make up your email’s foundation.

So, what’s an email marketer to do?

Ensure that Your Entire Email Is Rendered on iPhone & iPad

While using the native email clients for the iPhone and iPad, we noticed that in approximately 10-15% of our test emails, the reader only displayed a small segment of the original email. When this happens, it renders the loaded portion of the email with a button at the bottom which reads: ‘Download remaining XX bytes.’ Often times the button appears below the fold, especially in landscape view, making it easy to miss.

Here are a few work-arounds…

Stop Yahoo! Mail from Displaying Your Email Twice

If you use a simple street address in your email, there’s a chance that Yahoo might duplicate your content twice, or maybe even three times.  Each time, the repetative content starts with the city and state which caused the glitch in the first place.  Confused?  So were we, here’s more…

When It Comes to Email, Size Does Matter

As if things weren’t already hard enough, now we have to worry about file size?  That’s right ladies and gents, if your email exceeds 102K, Gmail will clip off the rest.

Stop Gmail from Wrapping Your Phone Number into Text Links

Both the desktop and mobile version(s) of Gmail now insert an anchor link around phone numbers. Check out this article for a few work-arounds…

Email Standards – Can We Make a Difference?

We all know that there should be a universal standard for HTML and CSS but the fact is email clients are far less concerned with compliance than web browsers. None of their users are complaining about the way advisements are rendered in their inbox. So can we make a difference? It may be wishful thinking but our answer to that question is: Yes!

We’ve Added Four Days to Each Email on Acid Subscription

In an effort to express how grateful we are for your patience and understanding, we will be extending each Email on Acid subscription by 4 days.  This means if your subscription was set to renew on the 5th day of this coming month, it will now renew on the 9th day and all subsequent renewals will be based on that date.  If you are on a 3, 6, 9 or 12 month plan, your auto renewal will also be extended 4 days.

The Dust has Settled, But We’re Not Out of the Woods Yet

To provide a recap of yesterday’s events. I want to start out saying once again, we are sorry for the downtime we experienced. We are honored that our customers have come to rely on our service and we take that responsibility very seriously.

Stop Yahoo! Mail from Rendering Your Media Queries

To make a long story short, each version of Yahoo! ignores your media query declaration along with all of its conditional statements and renders each of the styles as if they are outside of the media query to begin with. On top of that, it gets confused with your first declaration which is therefore ignored.  Here’s your fix…

Background Colors in HTML Emails

In my last article I explained why the large, horizontal gap sometimes appears in Outlook 2007 and 2010. Unfortunately the only perfect fix is to stack your tables so that you never have a table that exceeds 23 inches in height. One common strategy for setting a background color for all email clients is to create wrapper table with a width of 100%. This makes it challenging to keep your tables under 23 inches in height – especially when developing long newsletters. With that said, here’s another option you might consider…

Spacing Issues in Outlook 2007 and 2010

In some instances, Outlook 2007 and 2010 will render an unwanted vertical space in your email. We’ve been aware of issue for a while and figured it’s time we hunker down in search for an explanation. If you are running into this issue, hopefully this article will provide you with some useful work-a-rounds.

CSS Padding in Outlook 2007 and 2010

For those of you who design and develop HTML emails for Outlook 2007 and 2010, you already know that you are bound by tables and you have very limited CSS support. What you might not realize is that these two email clients completely convert your code from something legible into a seemingly foreign Microsoft language.  In this article, we tackle one of the more critical conversions you should be aware of when developing for these two tricky email clients.

Bullet Points in ULs Not Showing Up in Windows Mail, Outlook Express, and More

It was recently brought to our attention that sometimes bullets do not render in Windows Mail. After further research, we learned that if you have a CSS ‘width’ property set in a containing UL, your bullets will not render in Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Outlook 2003 and Live Mail.

The Android Mail App and CSS “Class” Declarations

While testing the native Android email application we found that it does not support embedded or linked CSS class declarations.

Check our our recommended solution…

Override Font Resizing on the Android

In reading one of Campaign Monitor’s more recent posts: Override the minimum font size on the iPhone and iPad, we had a hunch that this trick might also work on the native Android email client so we decided to investigate a little further.

Hexadecimal vs. RGB Values in HTML Emails

We had a recent question in our forums regarding which clients support hexadecimal vs. RGB values so I figured I would publish the results of my research to our blog as well.

In summary, it is best to avoid using rgb(255,0,0) values when developing HTML emails. Long hex (#F00F00), Short hex (#F00) and colors (red) are supported in all the email clients I tested.

The Google Font API and HTML Email

Google, in conjunction with Typekit, just released a new Font API that allows designers to easily import non-standard OS fonts into their web pages. The API uses the CSS @font-face rule but relies on their CDN to provide the data bandwidth, which is probably much faster than yours. After hearing about this we wanted to investigate and find out the email client support for such an API.