We’ve put together this CSS support in email clients guide to save you the time and trouble of figuring it out for yourself. With 21 different sets of results, all the major email systems are covered, both desktop applications and webMail.
Designing an HTML email that renders consistently across the major email clients can be very time consuming. Support for even simple CSS varies considerably between clients, and even different versions of the same client.
Desktop Clients
Here’s the list of email clients we tested for the 2008 CSS guide. We didn’t see any huge improvements across the board this year (there wasn’t a whole lot of updating going on) but Entourage 2008 certainly gained some ground. Hopefully it’s a sign of things to come from Redmond.
Web Clients
Below are the 8 web based email clients we tested this year. We added AOL Web, .Mac and new Gmail. We had high hopes for Gmail to improve on it’s rather low standards support but unfortunately, all the new Gmail really did was bring a cleaner user interface. The updated Live Hotmail interface brought some CSS improvements, including support for the <style> and <link> elements in the <head> and <body> tags.
