EOA Blog

The Best Strategies for Testing Your HTML Email

Although our email testing simulation is intended to make your life much easier, it is still vitally important to test your email in each of the popular web browsers as well.

In taking into account the complexity of testing your email, we must first consider the most popular email applications used today.  Then we will take a look at web based email clients, and finally we will touch on ways to ensure that your email will render correctly on mobile devices.

Absolute vs. Relative References

It is important to note:  Our Email Test only supports absolute references to links and images embedded within your email.  So what’s the difference between the two?  Hopefully this article will shed some light on the subject…

Email “Renderability”

Market research has led us to the conclusion that most emails are NOT getting tested for renderability – after all, is that even a word?

When we initially started developing our Email Test, our primary goal was to make life easier for the email designers and developers of the world – those who are hired to produce a professional template or layout for their clients.

People are Talking About Our Email Testing Tool!

And so far the response has been great!

We are thrilled to announce that the Email on Acid buzz has begun! In the past week, we have found 6 published articles in various websites detailing current issues regarding the lack of HTML email standards, the challenges of testing, our solution, and a list of the features we offer.

We would like offer our sincere gratitude to those of you who have taken the time to publish us!

Default CSS in Web & Desktop Email Clients

It’s important to beware!

It comes as no surprise that web clients use their own style sheets to render their pages. In the new version of Yahoo Mail and AIM Mail, emails are rendered inside an I-frame allowing for a fairly clean slate. However, in clients like G-Mail, Hotmail and Yahoo-Classic, they seem to make an attempt to reset browser defaults but several of their self-imposing styles are still carried over.

This issue may actually challenge the notion that you are always safe using the basics when it comes to tables and divs. In fact if you didn’t know that you needed to overwrite certain styles using embedded or inline CSS, your end result may look much different than expected.

Why Web Standards Matter for Your Email

Until now, designing and developing HTML emails has been like trying to hit a moving target while blindfolded. Each of the email clients have different standards for how they accept and render standard HTML and CSS.