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What email clients are used there?

This is not a “for sure” programming issue, but it is very related. We are writing an application that sends invitations by email to a client (no, this is not spam). Their designer gave us the HTML and CSS template to use, which is fine. The problem is that it looks like crap in Outlook 2007 because Microsoft decided to use Word (of all things!) As the rendering engine for HTML in Outlook 2007 . I want the client to understand that they should design a “compatible” look and would like to be able to show some statistics about which email clients are used there, namely, that Outlook 2007 is growing.

Does anyone come across any white papers, websites, studies that even come close to giving an idea about this? I do not expect the census level to be accurate, but something fairly reliable would be good. Thanks for any help.

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My understanding of generally accepted best practice in this is to encode the smallest common denominator. There are many email clients with sufficient use of in-the-wild, which are not very good at rendering "modern" HTML.

First, try to send your letters as a two-part, multi-user mime message. HTML part and plain text part.

Secondly, try to avoid using CSS or positioned divs where possible. Use table layouts and inline styles. It is preferable to specify as much style as possible in the HTML.

Try to save images as embedded IMG tags or only as table / row / cell background attributes.

The world of email is nowhere near as modern as it is, and, more importantly, much more diverse than in the world of browsers. If you follow these simple rules, your life will be much simpler than using a more advanced approach and adjusting it many times so that your content is satisfactorily displayed on a sufficient number of common customers.

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In the absence of general statistics, collect your own.

Check http://fingerprintapp.com/email-client-stats for a ready-made statistics tool and see http://www.mattbrindley.com/fingerprint-email-client-usage-1/ for a record of this. Matt Brindley also offers this gem: “So far, only Outlook has proven to be as popular as we expected, the iPhone has become a notable surprise for our own list, and Lotus Notes has also appeared unexpectedly.”

Of course, provide the text / html and text / plain mime types so that readers can choose which version to view and keep your html extremely simple until your statistics show that you can get a more convenient interface.

If the fingerprint fee is out of the question, you can collect your own statistics. Include hyperlinks in your HTML. When your CGI application receives requests from these hyperlinks, it can store HTTP_USER_AGENT in the database for your statistical analysis. This method is not completely reliable because some readers will adhere to plain text, some will never click any of the hyperlinks, and some email clients will not include useful information in the user agent request header, but this may give you enough information to continue .

Sitepoint, a respected source of W3 information, has an article http://www.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters/ in which Tom Slavin points out:

  • Use HTML tables to control the layout of the design and some presentation. You can use clean CSS layouts for your web pages, but this approach simply will not stay in the mail environment.

  • Use inline CSS to control other presentation elements in your letter, such as background colors and fonts.

Slavin also recommends templates from Campaign Monitor and MailChimp to get you started.

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Market share indicators will not help you. When developing HTML email, the only thing that matters is what the client uses, which your target group uses. It depends on the geographical area, industry, B2B / B2C - the variations in practice are huge. In some industries (journalism ...) you will even have to reckon with a huge population using clients such as Lotus Notes, which is known for supporting HTML a bit more nominally (shudders).

Outlook 2007, of course, cannot be neglected, in particular if you send business addresses, but with Vista on new PCs it also received a noticeable presence for private accounts.

The return trip does have data according to the industry.

However, in practice, a good approach is to follow the “save” recommendations in the lowest common denominator. Outlook 2007 is not the only problem client - Gmail is also quite famous for not having support for several design elements that others display just fine. You will find that an amazing number of web designers do support a sideline with HTML email design (there is demand, and this helps pay rent). If you are just starting out, Campaign Monitor (an email marketing service provider) has a wealth of good resources. You can start with the 2008 Email Development Guide . They are also one of those behind the Draft Email Standards .

Oh, I personally use Thunderbird with IMAP, Gmail, and RoundCube.

(Disclaimer / full disclosure: I really work for a competitor, in the free sense, Campaing Monitor.)

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you should look at ReturnPath - they specialize a bit on this.

Customers you might have to consider (other than Outlook):

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I have a forecast and gmail, but also a blackberry curve ...

The curve is AWESOME when working with something other than regular / text messages. To view the email on the website, follow the link at the top and consider sending a multi-page email message, which also has only a text section for clients that do not support HTML, etc.

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If you expect to encounter many business clients, remember that a very large number of them will use MS Office and Exchange Server, as well as Outlook. If you focus more on home users, most of them will either use some kind of webmail, or an email client that uses a regular HTML engine, such as Windows Mail, Thunderbird, Opera Mail, Mac OS X Mail.app.

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I use KMail, you should also look at Thunderbird, Outlook, Evolution, Lotus and Opera Mail.

Also keep in mind that many people use email such as GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc. And some webmail (and email clients) only work in text format for security reasons.

Personally, I believe that plain text messages are the best, many prefer not to allow HTML-formatted email messages for security reasons, and thus will simply view poorly formatted text mail anyway, no matter what you send, therefore in my opinion it would be better to just use plain text.

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Gmail - Private Mail

Lotus Notes - force it to be used for corporate mail :(

Lotus Notes sucks when rendering any HTML message correctly (we are working 6.5) and has only partial CSS support. The best HTML posts for him are simple table layouts.

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At work, we have 3 x KMail and 4 x mac OSX 'mail.
Further webmail as fail-over (squirrelmail on the mail server) in Firefox, Camino, Safari. We put the words in the mail, the rest - in the application.

Words (clear text messages) can simply be copied / pasted, forwarded, etc. no formatting issues.

Separate attachments allow the user to choose to view, download, save, etc.

This is the most versatile way to use mail.

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I ran into this problem a while ago. Most clients (including the web) block HTML! We simply created a web version of the email and added it to the email footer "If you can’t view the message, click here (link to the web version). It was just because some people think that it is not safe to display images; - ), so the best way to get them to open and read beautiful html letters

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I launch M2 (Opera’s built-in mail client) and always install “prefer plain text” for mail bodies. I also included "Block external elements."

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In addition, I think that if you send both text / plain and text / html, Gmail (webmail user interface) users have no choice but to view the text / html version.

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I came across this report / data, which clearly shows that Outlook 2007 is gaining popularity and is heading an upward curve. The following four top clients are currently being reported on this site (as a percentage of 100%, of course), but also that Outlook 2007 is growing. Hope this helps.

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/stats/email-clients/#most_popular

27.77% Outlook 2000, 2003, Express / 16.23% Hotmail / 14.14% Yahoo! Mail / 8.94% Outlook 2007

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I am using gmail

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