Testing HTML email rendering

Question

Are there any good tools to easily test how HTML email will look across different email clients? I prefer something with instant feed back rather than a submit and wait service like http://litmusapp.com Or at the very least a way to test the Outlook 2007/MS Word rendering?

I found this related question but it doesn't specifically address testing. What guidelines for HTML email design are there?

Answer 1

Campaign Monitor is quite popular and offers previews for many popular email clients.

Answer 2

Yes, you can use any of these popular tools:

• Litmus http://litmusapp.com/

• MailChimp http://www.mailchimp.com/

• CampaignMonitor http://www.campaignmonitor.com/

Answer 3

If you don't want to use a submission service like Litmus (Litmus is the best, BTW) then you're just going to have to run Outlook 2007 to test your email.

It sounds like you want something a little more automatic (though I'm not sure why), but fortunately Outlook is easy to automate using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

You can write a VBA tool that runs from the command line to generate an email, load the email up in Outlook, and even capture a screenshot if you wish. (Presumably this is what the Litmus team does on the backend.)

(BTW, do not attempt to use MS Word to test mail; the renderer is similar but subtle differences in page layout can affect the rendering of your email.)

Answer 4

I found emailonacid.com today (beta, currently free) - have only played with it a little but so far so good. It simulates the following clients:

• AOL 9
• Entourage 2004 & 2008
• Gmail
• Hotmail
• Windows Live Mail
• Windows Mail
• Mac Mail
• Outlook 2003 & 2007
• Thunderbird 2, 3 & Beta
• Yahoo Classic / Yahoo Mail

The very helpful thing about this service is it tells you what code is not supported in which client.

Answer 5

Thanks for the plug Dan!

This is Michelle with Email on Acid. We have recently made drastic improvements to our Outlook 07 simulation.

Now when you submit your email, we provide the translated version of your code so that you can learn and hopefully make sense of how the Word engine parses your HTML/CSS. Also, due to the fact that Outlook 07 is using a Word rendering engine, we where forced to render a screen shot of how it actually looks in Outlook 07 (vs trying to render it in common web browsers). Therefor, the results are guaranteed.

Thanks again and happy testing!

Michelle