Hi I am building a small web based email client. I am facing problems in displaying HTML mails. What are the best practices involved in displaying an HTML mail? Some things I found
Css Reset
Strip body tag in the mail
First of all, it's important to not allow all the CSS and HTML tags. I would look for the file and allow a defined set of HTML tags and CSS attributes.
For example, if you reset the CSS, you can still send stuff like <iframe>, <form> and all other possible malicious tags.
So I would start of thinking what kind of HTML tags would you like to support, and strip all other ones out of it. And then the same for the CSS.
This is by no means easy. I mean you also would have to take in account things like people trying to break your interpreter...
You could look into this Sitepoint Blogpost, it describes how people should code HTML-emails. So it might be a good idea to start there and see what's usually supported.
The one sentence answer would be "1. Use table-based layouts, 2. only inline CSS, and 3. test in every email client possible."
The client testing is probably the most important because every email client (and client + browser combination) may have its own quirks and many are just learned along the way; such as using HTML attributes width & height because Outlook won't always follow the inline styles for width & height, or that Gmail tends to add margins around images unless you explicitly set margin:0 for the HTML elements, etc. etc.
When fixing the look of an HTML email in one client ends up breaking it in another client, don't keep adding more and more styling: try to simplify the HTML/CSS, even if it means writing more markup. For example, if padding and margins don't look right, the same look could be achieved by adding more rows or columns to the table and fixing their heights/widths. More tags is simpler than worrying about how all the email clients will render the CSS box model.
There's a lot of articles and blog posts on HTML-for-email such as http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters that are helpful -- though a lot are out of date with newer versions of clients.
Related
I have a basic footer that would be super easy to create in almost any environment but email.
i am looking to do a email/phone/unsubscribe line to appear like
"email#email.com | 1-888-PHONENO (1-888-111-1111) | Unsubscribe"
works perfect in desktop view (600px width) but once i try and do anything responsive it dies and formats all crooked. I've had good luck with flex box with apple products, but many of the microsoft products (email clients) strip the flexbox out. so i am using table but finding it difficult to make it responsive.
I would use media queries but when i use display:none, it doesn't always work. it almost like the sendgrid console wont let me target certain elements. for example i can easily change the html background using html, but when i give classes to elements, nothing happens, id's either. its like the style doesnt get applied.
to solve this issue i'd be totally happy with writing different header/footers and then rendering them per the view (599 down, 600 up) if anyone has experience using media queries in emails or sendgrid please advise.
I could also write a responsive table but having trouble w how to set that up for the above. some of the items would need to be wrapped, like it would be ok to render on 2 lines in mobile as long as the style looked decent. right now it looks jacked.
you cant-
due to email clients rendering code totally different (some strip margins/padding, some strip flexbox, some strip other things from your css)
just stay to best practices: inline style, single column tables work good on almost anything. keep it simple.
I made a nice looking inline css flex box footer. looked great on mac/google products, looked like garbage on all outlook/samsung.
so i had to dumb down my beautiful footer to something that was more compliant across platforms.
litmus is a tool we bought that really helps. you basically just have to design it then test. litmus will show you previews on every possible email client so u can go thru and find a good balance of compatibility and design.
for sendgrid, the built in template and drag and drop option render good on everything. use the v3 api and dynamic templates. use a drag and drop then add html blocks to customize what u need to. use the drag and drop as much as possible because they build a robust html code for you. unless you want to manually type out a 600 line email that is totally disorganized.
I'm finishing up a Mailchimp template and Gmail is the biggest headache now.
In my head I have some styles (css) and media queries. If I put the media-queries at the bottom - it stops most of the styles from getting through. If I put the media queries at the top - all my styles work perfectly but the mail looks "broken down" (like it should under 600px width / Mobile) like the media queries already kicked in.
Firstly I didn't think Gmail should read anything inside of a media-query and secondly why are is my mail shown "responsive" when I have full browser width?
---- on a side note ---- I know I can go through everything and add inline styles but, I have three templates and I'd rather not if I can get away with it :)
I found out through extensive google-ing that I'm not the only one in the world that had this (weird) problem. I quote Lucas Mainardi below that posted an answer to a similar problem for Outlook.com.
Basically, putting an extra style tag with your media queries just before the closing body tag will fix things.
I've tested on my devices (gmail, iphone, thunderbird) and it doesn't seem to do any damage for clients that didn't have problems before. I'm also waiting for my Mailchimp inbox inspections to finish (where I test more clients like Outlook, Android etc). I'll edit my answer if it seems to do any harm, otherwise consider this a solution.
Hello James,
In the comments bellow I posted a possible solution to this issue in Outlook.com.
The problem seems to be the area in which the email is loaded. Apparently, the area starts out in a small size and is resized a few seconds later, but in that time the media queries fire up and display the mobile version. This is because the media queries are read first in the hierarchy of the code (they're at the head section) and the HTML email is read second.
The solution I found is to place the style section which contains the media queries after the HTML e-mail, specifically right above the closing body tag.
I tried this out in Litmus and all seemed to work just fine across the board (no other browsers/mobile devices/e-mail servers seem to be affected negatively, displaying the exact same version of the email with the styles in the head section).
Taken from http://emailwizardry.nightjar.com.au/2013/08/28/media-queries-in-html-email-cover-all-your-bases/
Since 'cellpadding' attribute is not supported in HTML5, what's the best way to apply padding to all cells in a table in HTML e-mail?
I've read that linked style sheets are are bad idea as widely ignored by email clients so at the moment I can only think of adding inline style="padding:5px;" to every element in table but this seems pretty long-winded!
Any ideas?
Even though something isn't supported, emails are a special rule. The bgcolor="" rule for example has been depreciated for a while, yet is still the best way to add a background color in email. In fact, most email clients strip out the doctag all together.
Linked style sheets don't work, even style tags are ignored by web clients.
Here and here and here are some references to get you started in the crazy world of html email design
I have a template which i used for sending emails written purely in hand made with css, and then i tested in Firefox/InternetExplorer/Chrome browser. But when i send that email to My boss PC as he is always Microsoft outlook user.
He always gets the alignment broken, texts broken all problems start. My question is how do you really write then? None of the web browser showing my template wrong.
I searched a lot, but most answers are not deeply and correctly well answered about this. I would really appreciate some experts input on this.
Thanks
outlook uses an older version of Trident, the CSS rendering engine. Depending on what Outlook your boss is on, the worse it can get. Outlook 2010 actually reverted to an older version of Trident because of Microsoft losing the Anti-trust case with the EU, so whatever version was before 2010 actually renders better, however they are both quite subpar # best.
you're going to want to literally stop developing with modern html/css and fall back on old school table layouts. i know, its gross, but you're going to have to do it for email.
the best tests are native, but if you don't have access to both versions (not many do) you should check out EmailOnAcid.com, they provide a plethora of email clients you can test on.
constantcontact.com, mailchimp.com and campaignmonitor.com all offer more than testing services if you need anything else.
Outlook 2007 is the bad guy. Any newer or older is much better. In Outlook 2007 lots of CSS commands don't work.
See this page: http://www.email-standards.org/ for details.
However, try sending your emails to Gmail.com and see how it gets displayed in Gmail web interface - Gmail is quite restrictive and as a rule of thumb, if it displays nicely, it should look good in other web clients too.
Some advice regarding HTML emails:
Outlook
It is good to provide width for Outlook, otherwise the CSS may crash.
Outlook doesn't support padding for <div>s / <p>s, float and various other things.
Gmail
For Gmail, you should use inline CSS in preference to defining classes.
Gmail actually parses CSS provided by you and for instance, changes height to min-height so using height is useless. However min-height of <td> is not respected by the browsers, so internal <div>s inside <td>s can be used to assure that min-height was applied.
Gmail strips background images, and generally in all email clients images are displayed upon user request for security reasons. Therefore, wrap images with <div> and set background color and color of this outer div, and provide alt (alternative text) for image (note also that images with empty src do not preserve width and height while rendered by the browser).
I am thinking of converting my forum input textarea exclusively to TinyMCE HTML editor. I already have both options but it is a pain maintaining both and inserting images in textarea needs preview etc...
This is more of a general question. Do you think it is safe to include HTML editor (with all the safety measures like paste only text, filter for html not allowed etc...) as the only kind of editor on a forum? It's 2011 and machines are generally fast, connection are better.
What are the downsides of using HTMl editor instead of text field? I can not imagine a blog CMS to have "normal" textarea for input.
But for some reason on forums I do not see many html editors... Even the TinyMCE site has a textarea for their editor. So is there really something to watch out for and a no go...?
I know it is more of a phylosophical question, but I guess you have experience with forums, blogs, etc...
My site is about cooking and beeing able to insert pictures (and upload them) the easy way seems to be a big plus for our home cooks ;-)
If you don't consider security (you'll need to filter the HTML input on the server side so it won't contain anything dangerous), there's only the user experience left for consideration. On a forum you write text most of the time. There's seldom any use for more functionality than bold, italics and images. The solution used here on Stack Overflow addresses this by having a very limited set of functions, and applying it in the textarea with a sane markup language.
Other forums either use old software or didn't think the improved user experience was worth the effort. The textarea-only solution fits most forums well enough since most of the input is text-only anyway.
I do think you would benefit from HTML input. Make sure that only allowed HTML can be sent though, since the user can circumvent everything on the client side.
TinyMCE uses Javascript to add functionality to an existing textarea. If Javascript is disabled, then the user will be presented with a normal textarea anyway.
I would say it's relatively safe, as long as all input from the user is validated on the server before it's used for anything.