We've been testing HTML email for our newsletter audience, and I
thought I'd share what we found to any who are interested.
I'm surprised at the current widespread support for cascading
stylesheets in the most popular mail clients. Yet,
simultaneously, I'm shocked at how badly the web-based email
services render email. Of course, web-based email services have
to solve the problem of displaying somebody else's HTML code
within their own wrapper--and it seems the solution is to
re-write (or mangle) incoming HTML mail.
In the specific case of hotmail, everything from the top of the
email (the doctype declaration) to the first table tag in our
email was overwritten--eliminating our stylesheet declarations as
well as any <body> tag modifications we had in place. To add
insult to the injury, Hotmail rewrites all the incoming image
SRC"*" and HREF="*" tags to point to their own caching servers.
But beware: the caching servers time out, so if a user keeps an
email message open too long (likely, if you send a lot of
content), the HTML redirects that Hotmail substituted for your
URLs start decaying.
Strangely, if you forward the message from Hotmail to some other
ISP or if you download your Hotmail messages with Outlook
Express, nothing gets rewritten--the original message arrives in
the remote inbox as though there had never been a badly mangled
version sent from Hotmail.
I tested the following clients:]
AOL 7
AOL 8
Eudora 5.2
Juno (web-based)
Netscape Composer 7.02
Outlook 2000 version 9
Outlook Express 6.0
Outlook Express 6.0 -- via Hotmail
Web-based (AOL)
Web-based (Hotmail)
Web-based (Yahoo.com)
Web-based (Yahoo.com printer friendly)
I have created full-length screen captures of each of these tests
(top of the email to the bottom) and can send a ZIP file with the
HTML used to create these emails and all the screen caps. The ZIP
file is 1.89 MB.
If you're interested, let me know. I'll send it.
Even though Hotmail comprises 20% of our newsletter audience we
have yet to resolve the presentation problems with their web
based client. I don't think we *can* resolve them right now. We
may have to send Hotmail recipients only TXT--but that's an
obviously drastic choice.
Does anybody have any suggestions?
Rich.
--
Richard Tatum
Website manager for Christianity Today International
email: rich@christianitytoday.com
web: christianitytoday.com
aol im: richtatum
<The flood of careless, unconsidered, cheap words, is
the
greatest enemy of the profound word> -Stephen L.
Talbott
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