Mail that looks good on desktop and mobile

Over the weekend I noticed a new CSS framework aimed at email rather than web development, “Antwort“.
This isn’t the first or only framework for email content, but this one looks simple and robust, and it allows for content that doesn’t just adapt for different sized displays but looks good on all of them. The idea behind it is to divide your content into columns, magazine style, then display the columns side-by-side on desktop clients and top to bottom on mobile clients. That opens up much more interesting designs than the more common single fluid column approach.

It looks nice, it supports pretty much every interesting email client, but it also comes with some directions based on real world experience.

  • Stopping Apple mail clients from turning bits of your content that look like dates or phone numbers or addresses into ugly blue links
  • Avoiding the Hotmail “why is my text green?” issue
  • Making Yahoo desktop show the desktop version, not the mobile version of the content
  • Maintaining your brand colours and fonts on gmail

The Antwort documentation also has lots of good links and advice on HTML authoring for email. Well worth a look.

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Looking towards the future

I had the opportunity to go to a seminar and networking event hosted by Return Path yesterday evening. The topic was “Email trends in 2012” and it was presented by Tom Sather.
If any of you get the opportunity to go to a talk presented by any of the Return Path folks I encourage you to do so. They know their stuff and their presentations are full of good information.
One of the trends mentioned is the increase in reliance on domain reputation. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. I wrote a little bit about it recently, but have focused more on the whole realm of content filtering rather than just domain reputation.
Domain reputation is where delivery is going. And I think a lot of senders are going to struggle with delivery as they find that IP reputation is not enough to get into the inbox.
 

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Thanks for your questions!

Thanks, everyone, who submitted questions to laura-questions@wordtothewise.com. We’ve gotten some great questions to answer here on the blog. I’m working through the emails and contacting folks if I have questions. I’ll be answering the first question on Wednesday.
I also did have someone harvest the address off the website and send me non-CAN SPAM compliant spam to it. I have to admit, I didn’t expect someone to harvest the address at all, but especially not within 12 hours of posting an address. Particularly someone who’s not harvested our contact address previously. I also am considering how much content I could get detailing taking the spammer to court in CA for violating CAN SPAM and the CA anti-spam statute.
 

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Things Spammers Do

Much like every other day, I got some spam today. Here’s a lightly edited copy of it.
Let’s go through it and see what they did that makes it clear that it’s spam, which companies helped them out, and what you should avoid doing to avoid looking like these spammers…

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