HTML emails, evil, but necessary - Blog - Philsbury

06 July 2010

I like building kick-ass, challenging websites. I suspect I’m not alone in the developer world with this statement, and nor would I be so in saying that I find building emails both trivial and a poor utilisation of my skills. But I’m also a realist.

For me, I’ll probably do 10 emails a week. On a quiet week.

The problem with emails is that they are in the dark ages when it comes to web development. I’ll not harp on about it too much as it’s been well document time and again by developers worldwide. But if the Microsoft’s and Lotus Notes of this world actually based their clients on a decent rendering engine the world would be a better place for everyone. All the negativity from designers and developers would be banished forever and a new era could begin in email marketing.

That, sadly, is a utopian state that is a long way off at present.

A lot of the issues I have are based around misconceptions, and more often, misunderstandings of the medium in question. Designers, concept teams and even clients need to forget “that cool thing they saw on this website”. It simply will not work in most instances. Video is out. Pretty backgrounds and gradients are pretty much out without a whole lot of extra code. Even animate GIFs are a bit hit and miss as if they will render a lot of spam engines will bin it before it can.

Another problem is that there are no standards. Nothing black and white to go by. More just a never ending amount of grey. Big names in the field have demo templates that I’m fairly sure would fall apart horribly in the likes of Outlook 07/2010 and Gmail. Others suggest extra code to redefine default HTML behaviours, and some suggest avoiding basic table practises such as row and column spanning. But all have elements that are true and can be used.

For me, however, emails pay the bills. They’re not exciting. Most times they are a chore and rarely do two follow the same guidelines. But they are a necessary evil that figures suggest do get a good response from their intended audience.

I notice this turned into a bit of an anti-email post. It wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps the title should have a question mark at the end? But no developer really wants to build an email. Next post, more positive. And interesting. Maybe. :)