How to create a functionality which will show how the html mail would appear in differrent mail clients?

Question

Hi, I am building an email marketing application, and in that I want to provide a functionality for the user to view his html mails in different mail clients. How can I create this? Please help.

Answer 1

Any email client will either use its own inbuilt HTML renderer/viewer(which generally will be a standards compliant) or the default one set on that particular OS. So if your email template looks same on all the browsers, it should show the same on all email clients. Check this from mailchimp

Answer 2

Interesting question!

To get useful results, you would have to actually render the E-Mail in each client. There is zero chance to do that within a client application, due to a multitude of platform and licensing issues.

The only way I can see is building some sort of web service, running on a server on which each client runs using a scripting engine (maybe with virtual machines for the various platforms, Windows, Mac OS, Linux...), and making screen shots of the rendered result, similar to what browsershots does for browsers.

While that is not impossible - you may even be able to use browsershots as a basis - it's going to be tough to set up, and possibly expensive as you would have to buy a number of commercial mail clients (Outlook, Lotus...)

You might be able to gain a big competitive edge by implementing this, but the effort would be huge.

Answer 3

The only viable option is to actually have the email rendered in a set of email clients, with the user of your service being given screenshots of the output.

The whole process can be automated. See how Litmus does this.

Answer 4

We've used a company called Pivotal Veracity in the past. Basically, you send your test email to an email address they provide and then you log in to their application to see how it renders in different email clients (even web clients). You can view the email as it would look with images on or images off.

Answer 5

You might also want to check out Email on Acid - they have an API out that is cheaper than Pivotal Veracity and Litmus and their results are generally much faster.