: How do I tell my boss that email responsive design is not perfect? I've been working on this new e-mail for a month now (concept, design and code) and after long testing on emailonacid and

@Correia448

Seeing that responsive emails are tricky fickle beasts, it might be best to consider an alternative:

Plain text.

I know, I know — this is the Graphic Design Stack Exchange. How could I propose such blasphemy?

Simple. They just work: blog.hubspot.com/marketing/plain-text-vs-html-emails-data
But like anything, test this hypothesis with your own customer base.



To summarize the HubSpot article (who, to their credit, even recognize the irony of publishing these stats):


HTML emails reduce open rates
HTML emails reduce clickthrough rates
Filters set up by email providers can divert commercial emails from users' main inboxes
Gmail will not automatically show images from unknown senders
Plain text might be perceived as less of a time commitment to read, or perhaps people really don't care for design in email.


And while it might mean a designer has one less task to do (or is out of a job), the results should be the determining factor if you were to use this approach.

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@Berumen635

Show her how emails get mutilated on different platforms and after forwarding or replying.

Desktops and phones handle email very differently, and peoples local settings affect look, size, images, preview, everything.

No one has complete control how an email appears on someone else's machine. Even the big companies like constant contact or signature formatting folks need to simplify and design for the least complicated display. They say it has to do with the receiver's email settings.

With CSS and HTML its unlikely the receiver sees what you want. It's uncommon that someones email is set up to interpret styles as you send them, for security reasons and others.

You can reassure her that you're designing for the most common settings with images turned on, for example, for most common platforms like Gmail, Outlook etc.

If you want to deliver fancy graphics you have to link to them in your email.

Also show her how your design degrades to decent plain text when someone is blocking features.

After forwarding or replying all bets are off but you can assume its reduced to simple black text, images often appear as broken links.

If its one character length that's causing the problem tell her all email subjects or preview lines must be kept under the character count which causes the bump to next line.

The problem is a real one, and it makes designers look bad, because email formats are so inconsistent and non cross compatible.

Responsiveness, css and html do not work consistently within emails. I believe its intentional, someone didn't want them to be like websites, but like plain letters.

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