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Last month I wrote about recent statistics regarding email marketing which contained a listing of email clients and their percentage of the market share. I’m going to stay on topic, and cover a few key points about producing HTML messages and the level of web standards support found in popular email clients.

Writing HTML email is much like building a web site in 1998. A lot of time is spent coding for specific email clients. Semantic markup and content usually take a back seat to presentation.

Most web-based email clients and desktop email clients have excellent web standards support. Unfortunately, a few that are popular have no support or partial support for embedded style sheets, float, width/height, margin, padding and background images.

Here are a few specific examples:

Detailed information about this can be found within the Email Standards Project acid test reports and screenshots.

An ideal situation when writing HTML email messages consists of using embedded style sheets and semantic markup. This is also the level of web standards support that the Email Standards Project recommends. In reality, your target audience usually dictate how you code your HTML email. For example, if a significant portion of the recipients on your mailing list use Gmail, then your clean standards-based code is not going to deliver the message you intended.

Until web standards in email clients are supported in the way that modern web browsers support standards, here are a few general tips and best practices for producing HTML email for a wide variety of email clients:

• Use tables for layout
• Define the width of each table cell
• Use inline styles instead of embedded style sheets
• Inline style declarations must not be written in shorthand
• Reinforce table cell padding and paragraph margins with inline styles

If you wish to learn more and help promote web standards for HTML email, visit email-standards.org or the Campaign Monitor forums.