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by bertolo1988 3166 days ago
I have had a job where they tried to implement emails 4 times. The last attempt is still ongoing and in my opinion destined to fail.

They wanted to implement few dozen of auto generated emails with huge content.

The task was suspended 3 times, always because of the same thing: cost. Its insanely costly and hard to make a good looking cross platform email. After every suspension there were new design changes to implement so we ended up starting almost from scratch in every attempt.

I worked on it for a bit and i can assure you email clients are the biggest shit. Specially Gmail and Outlook.

A few highlights:

* Javascript not allowed.

* Outlook processes HTML and CSS with a specific engine which is also used in Microsoft Word.

* Outlook does not support paddings.

* Gmail requires the styles to be all inline.

* We followed Foundation Zurb recommendations and used tables all over. Still didn't work on all clients.

Humanity urgently needs to replace the emails with something else. Not only because the clients suck but because the protocol is outdated.

3 comments

>I worked on it for a bit and i can assure you email clients are the biggest shit.

All the complaints you listed are features in my book. The only problem is that they even allow what they do.

Exactly. There is no way in hell I want JavaScript running in my email.
You will never convince me that Microsoft rendering HTML using the MS Word engine is a feature.
I had nightmares about this during the project. I am not even joking.
You don't have to convince me. Writing HTML e-mails, especially for higher ups that have no concern for the limitations of the platform, is awful. This is why I just insist on using Mailchimp templates these days[1]. They've done the hard work, it just works (usually), let's just focus on content.

[1]Pick your poison, but I find Mailchimp a great mix of easy to use, flexible, and functional.

I hope you have another argument in store, as I for one am not interested in replacing email just so companies can market more prettily to me.
The day mail clients start supporting Javascript is the day I check out and go live in a cabin.