I detest HTML emails.

+1

+2

Yes, but you lot are all contrary geeks!

I used to hate HTML emails, but clients such as Outlook or even the one on my phone now handle them intelligently enough that they don't bother me any more. It's one click if I do want the content, and no clicks if I don't.

What I do hate is when people have stupidly large signatures including great big images. Luckily Outlook asks if you want to "download content" when you reply or forward, so at least you don't have to perpetuate it. If it's really bad, then it's one or two clicks to reply in plain text which often then forces their email client to keep the thread that way.

I really can't see what more Outlook could do to improve the way it handles the issue. As an aside, I read them on my phone in landscape if I really want to see the latest offers from wherever.

What does irritate me is when people have fifteen accreditation logos and then send me an attachment!

The biggest problem is that Outlook can't handle HTML e-mail... It uses Microsoft Word's HTML rendering engine, which is atrocious! Why the heck they don't use IE's engine, I don't know.

As such, it doesn't support DIVs, CSS3 and a bunch of other standards which have been used in HTML in the last decade.

It makes trying to create standard HTML e-mails, which can be seen by everybody a complete pain in the rear. Get it working fine on smartphones and webmail in browsers and Outlook will probably barf. Switch it around and code for Outlook and it looks odd in browsers and on some smartphones, or you have to severely restrict what features you use and restrict the style of your e-mail, so that it works on as many platforms as possible.

To be honest I don't really see that as a big problem. Just how rich do you want your email content to be? Half the people on here will be reading it in plain text anyway!

I do wonder why Word's rendering would be so different to IE though. Seems a little odd. However, Word is the editor of choice in Office and IE is not an editor and not part of office so that choice isn't going to change.

The problem is, I have to generate HTML newsletters and my boss gets upset when they don't look right in his e-mail. The problem is, he views it in Outlook half the time and the other half on his iPad... And he wants swishy layouts etc.

Also doesn't help, that the newsletter service we used only knows "American". It can't cope with accented or umlauted characters. That means, I paste the text into the WYSIWYG view, it looks fine, but if you publish it, half the text disappears. E.g.

Schöne Grüße aus Quakenbrück

becomes:
Schne Gre aus Quakenbrck

You have to switch from WYSIWYG mode into HTML mode and replace each "un-American" character with its equivalent HTML entity.

So it becomes:

Schöne Grüße aus Quakenbrück

Then you give that to the proof reader to check over and they remove all the HTML entities and you are back at square one! Grrr!

I feel for you Dave, I suffer he same problem. Tables, tables everywhere!