This week I was designing a new newsletter template for a company. They had been using an HTML template with plenty of presentational elements and tables embedded within the code.

Pah! said I, haven’t these guys ever heard of CSS?

Don’t they know the many benefits of separating style from the content?

Any anyway, just who uses tables in HTML anymore?

Turns out, the answer to that question is: anyone who wants their email to be readable in Google Gmail and Microsoft Outlook! These two clients don’t support CSS. Well at least not the way I would want to use it. Gmail needs it to be inline, so not a huge step on from old-fashioned style mixed in with HTML, and Outlook’s support is extremely limited.

Most Popular Email Clients

Having mainly used Outlook, Gmail or, years ago, Hotmail, it seemed to me that those two would account for a fairly substantial chunk of the market. There’s not a great deal of data available but I did find a resource: According to CampaignMonitor‘s survey, the most popular email clients are Outlook (32%), Yahoo (15%), Hotmail (15%), Outlook 2007 (7%), Apple Mail (6%), Gmail (5%):

So using my “future proof” smarty-pants CSS and XHTML solution would mean that a large percentage of the users would not see the newsletter in all its beautifully-styled glory! Looks like I’ll be heading back to HTML table land for now, using Tim Slavin’s great article for advice: How to Code HTML Email Newsletters.

I’ll also keep an eye on http://www.email-standards.org/ and hope that it won’t be too long before web standards support and accessibility reaches email.