Writing HTML emails for Google Mail

HTML is rarely worth writing about, but this is just silly.

Google appears to butcher any attempt at a sane HTML email you may want to make. Why? I have no idea.

This Blog Post details many of the issues surrounding how Google Mail interprets HTML email.

Google Mail is a new webmail service that acts like an artifact of the early 1990s when web standards were primitive.

For one thing, Google Mail deletes any CSS style reference to a set of styles, no matter where it appears in the email. And fonts displayed in html tables, the only alternative to using styles, have the odd habit of appearing larger than intended no matter how the html email is coded.

I had to go through every tag and explicitly state the CSS styles on each element. Yes, every paragraph, every image, every table cell. Ridiculous. And this is enough of a pain that I lack motivation to test it on other email clients. I’d assume other clients don’t break by using this hack.

I absolutely hate this kind of behavior. I never liked messing with CSS in the first place, much less in an email. Its too… “magic”.