Meet Litmus, My New Best Friend

A few weeks ago, I was introduced to an email-testing application called Litmus.  This one application has saved me countless hours of email compatibility testing.

Litmus’s claim to my heart is that it “shows you exactly how your designs look on every platform, across every popular web browser.” And “shows you exactly how your email is seen through the eyes of your readers, in whatever email system they might be using.”

In short, what the Litmus application does is collects your HTML email code (either by receiving it at a dummy address, or by the user loading it to the program) and runs it through up to 19 different email clients and shows how your HTML would render to each of those clients. Once the code has run and the screenshots are completed, you can view it in the Inbox, the Preview Pane, with images blocked, or the full email with all images in each client selected.

There are still a few things that I have issues with. A couple of tests coming back have not shown the full screenshots, only the inbox message. However, that has only occurred twice in the dozens of tests I’ve performed. So far that is the only shortcoming that I’ve found. And that is a small price to pay when it has saved us hours of QA testing.

If you would like to test it for yourself, try the basic pass for free - up to 50 tests per month: https://litmusapp.com/pricing  .