HTML and different email providers

Question

Hi,

Most of you probably know the following problem: You edit an HTML, view the result in your browser and happy with it.Then, you send it through different mail providers (AOL,YAHOO,GMAIL...), and discover that after going through their mail servers it may look completely different (not to say worse) than you've expected it to. The view differs not only between what you see in your own browser before and after sending the HTML as an email, but between different email providers as well. A short "view source" will convince you that each email provider CHANGES (generically) the HTML.

My question: A.I've heard there's an application allowing you to check how your html would look after going through each one of the US main email providers, so I can edit my html respectively. Can you tell me where I can find it?

B.Alternative ingenious solution? (less preferable..)

Answer 1

The only application I know which checks a lot of email providers is MailChimps' Inbox Inspector: http://www.mailchimp.com/features/power%5Ffeatures/inbox%5Finspector/. It sends screenshots of your email from several different inboxes. However, it's not free.

Alternatively, you can use appropriate HTML for emails, which will result in the same email in almost every inbox. Apprpriate HTML for emails are:

• Use tables instead of divs
• Use inline styles
• Don't use background images
• Do not float