Everyone wants their emails to look nice. In the early days, there was plain text with no formatting or images. Now, almost all email clients understand HTML, the language used to build web pages. A little formatting can be a dangerous thing, however. A friend writes:

…[A] well meaning woman who handles *****’s online sales orders, mailing list, email list, etc. has been sending out horrible HTML emails. After informing ***** of the problem and encouraging him to get her to send simple email announcements until she can learn what the hell she’s doing, I decided to research the subject a bit and try making some myself. I thought browser compatibility of web sites was a pain, but it ain’t nothing compared to email reader compatibility. Any suggestions as to the simplest, most reader friendly html editor for emails?

It took me a few days to come up with a response, because there’s no easy and quick answer. I finally came up with this:

As I’m sure you discovered, there aren’t really any standalone HTML email editors out there, aside from those that are built into products that are designed to create and manage bulk mailings. And most of those are pretty clunky.

For simple text formatting (bold, italics, bulleted lists, embedded links, etc.), I’d just use whatever tools are available in my regular email client. If it looks right in the outgoing client, chances are good that it will at least be readable by most other clients.

To do anything more complex or including images, compose the message in an HTML editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Try to end up with the simplest possible HTML, because you don’t know how well the receiving client is going to render it. Avoid nested tables like the plague. When CSS styles are used, they should be inline, as many email clients don’t understand them otherwise. Images should not be embedded in the message. Rather, they should be hosted somewhere and referred to by absolute URL within the email. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1) sending hundreds or thousands of emails, each containing multiple embedded images, is rude to both the recipients who have to download them and to the Internet as a whole and 2) emails with embedded images are much more likely to be treated as spam.

Once the HTML is written, insert it into an email message and send it out normally, using a local email client. The method for doing this will vary depending on the client. I couldn’t figure out quickly how to do it in Outlook but it wasn’t hard in Outlook Express.

If I was going to do regular bulk mailings using HTML, I would use an online service, like www.ConstantContact.com. They have expertise in making this type of mail work in as many email clients as possible. They also have lots of tools to make mail campaigns easy to create and manage. This is probably overkill for *****, so he needs to keeps things simple.

[Note that, while these comments were written with bulk mailings in mind, the same general rules can be applied to sending single messages. Keep it simple and your recipients will thank you.]

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