« Safe CSS Styles for HTML Emails »

Recently I have been recreating a lot of html emails. I used to code all my html email with absolutely no CSS styling. Fortunately for us modern email clients are slightly more flexible.

I have been interested in finding a place where I could see all the CSS styles that can be safely used when coding HTML emails. I found this article  http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ that tested many of different style attributes across the most popular email clients both online and off. What I really wanted though was a list of every style I could safely use in all my emails regardless of what they will be viewed on. So I have slimmed down their extensive list and created this list of styles that can safely be applied to every email I send. I never really know if the email will be going to a web email client or a desktop client so I had to combine both their lists into one.

While this new list is not perfect I think its a safe place to be when coding.

CSS Styles to use in HTML email

• background-color
• border
• color
• font-size
• font-style
• font-variant
• font-weight
• letter-spacing
• line-height
• padding
• table-layout
• text-align
• text-decoration
• text-indent
• text-transform

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Email clients tested

• Outlook ‘03
• Outlook ‘07
• Windows Mail
• Mac Mail
• Entourage 2004
• Entourage 2008
• Thunder- bird 2
• AOL 9
• AOL 10
• AOL Mac
• Notes 6 (ignored because it doesn’t like anything)
• Old Yahoo
• New Yahoo
• Old Gmail
• New Gmail
• Live Mail
• Hotmail
• AOL Web
• MobileMe

Even with a resource like this I still find ReturnPaths campaign preview tool to be one of the most useful tools ever. I can mail a test to them and they will give me screen shots of what it looks like in many clients both with images on and off. MailChimp also has a tool like this.

I also find MaxBulkMailer to be extremely useful for sending bulk emails to my own test accounts.