As mentioned previously, I have been doing some simple email templates for our project. While we were in development, we could only send emails locally, so I was able to ensure outlook handled them properly. When we opened it up to web clients, however, we encountered several “idiosyncracies” we had to account for.
As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to set the appropriate DOCTYPE. Yes, an admirable idea, but I completely ignored the fact that these emails were being rendered within an HTML page — hence, my DOCTYPE and html wrapper tags were stripped out. There went my doctype, along with my good old-fashioned attribute specifications for bgcolor, alink, vlink and text. So it was back to manually specifying stylistic information on every element (on the whole I’d done this already, it was the bgcolor for the entire email that was missed out on, so I had to add it to a table that was specified at 100% width and height.).
I also encountered some fun with these “smart” webclients trying to interpret the text. We have the typical disclaimer at the top of the page, “to continue to receive emails, please add XXX@mydomain.com to your address book”. Both yahoo and gmail tried to make links of things we didn’t intend, mucking with the overall look of the email. So now I am having to go back and change periods into . and at symbols into @.
Not that any of these are difficult tasks, but they were small stumbling blocks, so I wanted to be sure to capture them for next time–
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