Emails are the most popular way to communicate in corporate world. Most company’s use it for communicate with their clients and send updates. HTML email allows the sender to properly express quotations, headings, bulleted lists, emphasized text, subscripts and superscripts, create and send beautiful graphics, create clickable links and use interactive forms.

After design a layout for mailer or newsletter, tough job is that htmlized HTML email which will display correctly on most webmail and email clients. Htmla email have lots of compatibility issues and has problems with rendering consistently across platforms and software.

I am writing some tips which help you to design and code email newsletter support by mostally email clients.

1. If you are using an image in email then use alt tag for every image because most of the email client blocks images by default then alt tags are best chances to convey message to user.
2. All the graphics/images should have width and height attribute.
3. Do not use big images as it can be recognized as a Spam by email client.
4. Do not use background images to make text readable. Your text must be visible with or with or background image because many email clients not support background image.
5. Do not use image map because many email clients not support it (like gmail). Image will display but link will not work.
6. Use HTML table to control design and layout and inline CSS style for presentation, color, fonts and backgrounds.
7. Always use available table attribute where they possible like cellpadding, cellspacing, border, valign. Align, height and width. It helps older email clients to display the email properly. Just try to keep your code as simple as possible.
8. If you are using CSS in html email than place css style below the HTML BODY tag. Don’t use it in the HTML HEAD tag.
9. Different email clients have different CSS support even different version of same clients also. You can get all details about that at:
   http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
   http://www.xavierfrenette.com/articles/css-support-in-webmail/
   http://www.email-standards.org/
10. Must put a link of web-based version of the email. If someone having trouble viewing your email he can check its web-based version by clicking of the link.
11. Don’t forget a text-based version of your email. If someone set his/her email client to show only text based mailer he can get your text based mailer.
12. Ask your recipients to add your sending address to their address book every chance you get. This will ensure your images are displayed by default in a range of popular email environments.
13. Avoid javascript. Most email clients disable this automatically or may block your email as potential security risk.

I hope this article will help you to create a good emailer.

cheers!!
joginder Poswal