It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
On the regular web (I suppose) we handle "dark mode" with the CSS prefers-color-scheme media query. But, and to nobody's surprise, it's way weirder in the land of HTML email. The weirdness is that across different email clients, they handle the dark mode thing differently, starting with the fact that the email client itself might have its own toggle for dark mode.… Read article
As long as I can remember the main source for feature support in HTML email clients is Campaign Monitor's guide. Now there is a new player on the block: caniemail.com.
HTML email is often joked about in how you have to code for it in such an antiquated way (<table>s! really!) but that's perhaps not a fair shake. 2 years ago Kevin Mandeville talked about how he used CSS grid (not kidding) in an email:
… Read articleOur
We don't generally think of CSS animations or transitions inside of email, or really any movement at all outside of an awkward occasional GIF. But there is really no reason you can't use them inside HTML emails, particularly if you do it in a progressive enhancement-friendly way. Like, you could style a link with a hover state and a shaking animation, but if the animation (or even the hover) doesn't work, it's still a functional link. Heck, you can … Read article
You love HTML emails, don't you?
As a developer, probably not... but subscribers absolutely do. They devour them, consume them on every device known to man, and drive a hell of a lot of revenue for companies that take their email marketing seriously.
But most web developers tasked with building HTML emails merely want to get them out the door as quickly as possible and move on to more interesting assignments. Despite email's perennial value for subscribers, tight timelines, and … Read article
Campaign Monitor has completely updated it's guide to CSS support in email. Although there was a four-year gap between updates (and this thing has been around for 10 years!), it's continued to be something I reference often when designing and developing for email.
Calling this an update is underselling the work put into this. According to the post:
The previous guide included 111 different features, whereas the new guide covers a total of 278 features.
Adding reference and testing results … Read article
Last week's ShopTalk Show was all about HTML Email. It's such a fascinating subject, as technically it is front-end web development, but it almost feels like a bizarro alternate universe.
We have dozens of browsers to worry about, they have hundreds of clients to consider. We worry about whether fancy new APIs are supported, they worry about whether padding is supported. We have grid layout, they have.... grid layout?!
It's tempting to make the joke: "It's coding like it's 1999!"… Read article
And you use them pretty much just like you'd use custom fonts on a website. Jaina Mistry had the scoop on this last year over on the Litmus blog:
… Read articleWhile web fonts don't have universal support, here are the email clients where they are supported:
- AOL Mail
- Native Android mail app (not Gmail app)
- Apple Mail
- iOS Mail
- Outlook 2000
- Outlook.com app