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copied!<p>It's actually <em>really</em> hard to make a decent HTML email, if you approach it from a 'modern HTML and CSS' perspective.</p> <p>For best results, imagine it's 1999. </p> <ul> <li>Go back to tables for layout (or preferably - don't attempt any complex layout)</li> <li>Be afraid of background images (they break in Outlook 2007 and Gmail). </li> <li>The style-tag-in-the-body thing is because Hotmail used to accept it that way - I'm pretty sure they strip it out now though. Use inline styles with the <code>style</code> attribute if you must use CSS.</li> <li>Forget entirely about <code>float</code></li> <li>Remember your images will probably be blocked - use background and text colour to your advantage - make sure there is some readable text with images disabled</li> <li>Be very careful with links, be especially wary of anything that looks like a URL in the link text - you will anger 'phishing' filters (eg <code><a href="http://domain.tld">www.someotherdomain.tld</a></code> is <strong>bad</strong>)</li> <li>Remember that the "fold" on webmail clients tends to be extremely high up the page (on a 1024x768 screen, most interfaces won't show more than a hundred pixels or so) - get your identity stuff in right at the top so the recipient knows who you are.</li> <li>Recent version of outlook have a "portrait" preview pane which is significantly narrower than you may be expecting - be very wary of fixed-width layouts, if you must use them, make them as narrow as you can.</li> <li>Don't even <em>think</em> about flash, Javascript, SVG, canvas, or anything like that.</li> <li>Test, a lot. Make sure you test in a recent Outlook (things have changed a lot! It now uses Word as its HTML rendering engine, and it's crippled: <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx" rel="noreferrer">Word 2007 HTML/CSS support</a>). Gmail is pretty finicky also. Surprisingly Yahoo's webmail is extremely good, with nice CSS support.</li> </ul> <p>Good luck ;)</p> <p>Update to answer further questions:</p> <blockquote> <p>Don't use more than two levels of nesting in tables</p> </blockquote> <p>I believe this is an older guideline pertaining to Lotus Notes. Nested tables <em>should</em> be okay, but really, if you have a layout that's complicated enough to need them, you're probably going to have trouble anyway. Keep your layout <strong>simple</strong>.</p> <blockquote> <p>Be careful of nesting background images in cells/tables</p> </blockquote> <p>This may be related to the above, and the same applies, if you're getting that complicated then you <em>will</em> have problems. Recent versions of Outlook don't support background images at all, so you'd be best advised to forget about them entirely.</p>

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