We had to make an HTML mailing for a client. Enters our problem : Outlook 2007. So you thought you could use divs with fixed widths and background colours. Forget all about it, in fact, forget all about css based design.

Instead, use… tables.

In pre-school we were all taught “Tables are evil”, and should only be used for tabular data (duh). Thank you Bill, we’re back to square 1.

Let’s say you would like a red border around the  500 px wide content of your html mail, common sense tells us to use a div. However, our “favourite” e-mail program shows us it can’t be done. It joyfully extends the width of the div to the whole screen width.

So, the solution is to go back to some old-school table based html code, the nightmare !!!

In fact, we can forget about a lot of common html goodies, like background images, css floating or positioning.

So, the number one advice is : make sure you get a well designed html mailing that is both attractive to your customer, and plays nicely with e-mail clients, how good or how bad they are.

PS : don’t trust wysiwyg editors, trust notepad.