Not long ago, Alex spent some time researching the CSS secrets of Lotus Notes to help get the HTML versions of our email newsletters to display properly in that client. But in the wild and wooly world of HTML email, Lotus Notes is only the worst offender on death row. There are plenty of other badly-behaved email clients out there, and most of them aren’t as considerate as Eudora (which simply doesn’t support CSS at all).
Over at the Campaign Monitor blog, David Greiner has posted a complete guide to CSS support in all the popular email clients, both desktop and web based.
This guide will save you a ton of time, even if all it does is convince you that CSS in email is a lost cause.
Consider: if you want to avoid applying style attributes to your HTML tags, you’ll have to sacrifice support for GMail entirely, and you’ll need to use both a <style> tag in the <body> to support the web email clients and a <link> tag in the <head> to support Lotus Notes.
Sound ridiculous? Tip of the iceberg, I’m afraid…
Kevin YankKevin Yank is an accomplished web developer, speaker, trainer and author of Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL and Co-Author of Simply JavaScript and Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong! Kevin loves to share his wealth of knowledge and it didn't stop at books, he's also the course instructor to 3 online courses in web development. Currently Kevin is the Director of Front End Engineering at Culture Amp.
