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Art is a visual business.  So, obviously, artists want to send nice looking email newsletters, which means, if you want to display images, your emails must be composed with HTML and not plain text.

We're all accustomed to HTML rendering reliably in our web browsers.  But, unfortunately, email programs don't render HTML in the same way.  Email programs munch, mangle and alter your HTML to meet their own needs. And that leads to frustration when you're trying to create a reliable email newsletter design.

FASO's awesome Artist Support Agents see this issue fairly often.  Customers say, "My email newsletter doesn't look the same in my email inbox as it did in the preview while I was designing it." 

That is frustrating for both the artist and us!

When the design as rendered in your browser differs from what you see in your email inbox...that's one problem.    An even worse problem is that, more often than not, the design will look a bit different in each and every email program.  So even if you manage to wrangle the design into an acceptable look for your email program.  It might still look horrible in someone else's email box.  For example, sometimes a design looks great in Gmail, but horrible in Outlook.  Sometimes it's the other way around.  Sometimes it works in Hotmail, but not Gmail.  You get the idea. 

Why don't email programs render html properly, you wonder?  Well, the short answer is:  it's a quagmire due to different historical design decisions from various software vendors.  Let's explore the long answer below.

The "world wide web" is displayed through web browsers, which were designed from the beginning around HTML.  But, the email protocol was originally designed to support only plain text.  

As the web experienced rapid growth, email needed a way to keep up.  So, a way to "bolt on" HTML  to the email protocol was developed, and email software vendors added HTML rendering engines.  Unfortunately, back then, there wasn't really a set of standards on how to do that.  So, each vendor made their own decisions on how to render the html, resulting in different results in different email programs.  Most email software doesn't fully support modern design techniques such as rendering the page layout with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).  And some of the programs maintain a broken way of rendering html so that the programs maintain backward compatibility with other old software versions that people run.  

Since email programs use different and inferior rendering engines than web browsers, your newsletter might look great when viewed in Internet Explorer but awful when viewed in Outlook.  That is due to the unfortunate fact that Microsoft uses the Word rendering engine in Outlook.  And there are tons of differences in the way Word and Internet Explorer render html.  So what you see in Internet Explorer isn't what you get in Word or Outlook.  So now, you might be thinking you can design your newsletters in Word.  Sure, that might look fine in Outlook, but Word generates truly horrid html that will not render properly anywhere else.  So unless every single one of your subscribers uses Outlook, using Word to design your newsletter is not an option.  And they all are a bit different: Lotus Notes, Thuderbird, Mail.app, Sparrow, Outlook, etc, etc, etc.

When you use a web mail program like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo, the results are generally a tad better.  After all, web mail programs are using your web browser to render the HTML.  However, web mail programs have to protect themselves against what we programmers call "malicious code injection."  So web mail programs strip out, from your email newsletter, any html they think is "bad".  They might also strip out html that might interfere with the rendering of the email program itself, so, that means, they usually have no support for JavaScript and limited CSS support.

Another problem is that people and corporations get behind on the upgrade cycle and continue to run old versions of software that didn't support some newer html tags.  I personally know some people still (in 2013) running Outlook 2003 (or even Outlook 2000)!

What all of these different rendering engines mean is that the only way to be sure your email newsletter looks correct is to stick to a small, safe subset of html and then to rigorously test each design in every major email program....and different versions of those programs.....and with images blocked...and with images enabled.    One option for artists would be to pay a designer to design your email designs and test them in all of these email programs.  Then you could use the same design over and over, being careful to only change your content and none of the html itself.  Like I said before, it's a quagmire.

As I said earlier, all of these issues have led to a lot of frustration for some of our customers.  And we have been listening and working on a better way. 

At FASO, we believe we've finally come up with a solution to this issue.  What we've designed is a prototype that we're calling ArtfulMail.  

Here's what we've done:  We've created pre-made newsletter templates which have been tested in more than 50 major email clients.  We've also created an editor that lets you change the colors and the content but, importantly, the editor does not let the user change the html of the design.  That would break the HTML that we've rigorously tested.  We think this is an approach that can give artists peace of mind that their emails will render correctly.  

While ArtfulMail is still in the very early testing phase, you can learn more about it here.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson

FASO Founder, Software Craftsman, Art Fanatic