html email with consideration for Blackberry.

Question

Hi, I'm supporting a system which sends an automatic populated email alert. I've rendered the page using a combination of CSS and html. The alert is sent from a system called Salesforce. My problem is, I've never owned a blackberry, and don't have access to one for testing purposes, but I know the alert looks like crap on it.

It seems to be reading the page as plain text, after rendering it and stripping all styles, tables etc. What considerations should I employ the increase the readibility of the alert on a blackberry.

Regards Nonick.

Answer 1

Only very very recently has RIM released firmware that supports HTML email. That firmware still needs to be customized by the carriers and updated by the consumers. Also, the BES server has to be upgraded to the latest version to support HTML email.

My guess is that there will not be many Blackberry users that support HTML email at this point. I have upgraded mine with a bootleg firmware and have to say that even with the support HTML emails are very hit-and-miss. Sometimes they render, sometimes they don't; sometimes it depends on the sender, sometimes it just depends on the time of day.

The HTML email support on the blackberry is pretty industry standard though, if it would render properly in the Blackberry web browser it should look fine as an email.

Answer 2

One testing option would be to run the BlackBerry emulators. Getting email on to them is quite tricky, but you can at least use the browser to test the rendering if you set the message up as a web page.

I'm not convinced by joshperry's comment that the rendering is the same across browser and email app, but then again the BlackBerry platform is such a nightmare to develop with I've been wrong about lots of things...

Answer 3

Maybe you should send the e-mail both in HTML and Plain-text. With plain-text, you can still format things in a decent way. There are more groups who do prefer plain-text over HTML. The e-mailprotocol, and most clients and servers support sending a message in both formats.

Answer 4

Ended up checking compatability of Litmus across several browsers then ensuring that text rendering was ledgible and that all my 'alt texts' were in order. (litmusapp.com) very nifty tool not cause it lets you know about any compatability problems, but allows you to refer to a link so that marketing people who believe your current Microsoft Word email template works FINE on their computer. PS it renders gmail and hotmail for free.

Answer 5

To start with, in order to see HTML rendered e-mail on a BlackBerry simulator, no matter the model, the simulator must run off of a BES connection (corporate BlackBerry server), as the included ESS (the software POP/SMTP proxy app that allows you to test BlackBerry e-mail services locally), does not support HTML e-mail.

Alternatively, if you have no access to BES, you can still test HTML e-mail rendering with BIS (personal internet connection), but you would need to do so on a real device. You can build a program fairly quickly which listens to incoming e-mail on the device an then delivers the original source of the incoming e-mail to you for debugging.

That being said, the older models of BlackBerry (around RIM OS 4.1), do not support HTML e-mail. If they receive HTML e-mail, they will display the full HTML source code, tags and all.

As of RIM OS 4.5, HTML support has been implemented in the BlackBerry e-mail application. In these cases, if the device receives an HTML message, it will attempt to display the HTML rendered format, as best as it can.

If the device cannot render the HTML for whatever reason (such as if this is a simulator running with ESS), and the message is a MIME hybrid, where it contains both HTML and text-only parts in one message, the device will display the text-only version of the e-mail. If the e-mail message is HTML only, and doesn't contain a text-only equivalent in the same e-mail, the device will attempt to strip out the HTML bits and tags and such, and will attempt to present the HTML message as it's own text-only version.