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Email Design Podcast #65: Litmus Community Q&A Rapid Fire
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In the 65th episode of The Email Design Podcast, Kevin Mandeville and Jason Rodriguez answer recent questions from the Litmus Community in a rapid fire format, including topics on Windows 10 Mail auto-linking, layouts breaking in Outlook.com, ideal email layout width size, and more. Be sure to follow along and join in the discussion on Twitter using #EmailDesignPodcast.
In this episode:
- (0:35) Why is Windows 10 Mail automatically underlining my links? Windows 10 Mail automatically underlines its links, which is unique behavior from other Outlook clients. We outlined fixes to this issue in our Windows 10 Mail rendering blog post.
- (2:42) Why is Outlook.com adding space and underlining my text? This behavior is actually caused from using an invalid placeholder link (#). Outlook.com breaks the rest of the formatting following that link. Using a valid link (i.e. http://litmus.com) fixes this rendering issue.
- (4:18) Why is iPhone automatically inserting links into emails for “bono”? It appears iOS has introduced auto-linking for popular celebrities, which is why the “bono” in “pro bono” linked to the U2 lead vocalist. Use the zero-width non-joiner hack (‌) inside the term to break that auto-linking.
- (7:08) Why is Terra Mail stripping my Outlook conditional comments? This is expected behavior, as Outlook conditional comments will only render in Outlook clients. Terra Mail will not recognize these comments.
- (8:32) Does Android Lollipop have a native email client? For Android 4.4 and below, Android used its stock native Android OS email app. For Android 5.1 and above, Android switched to using Gmail app as its default mail app. You can learn more with our resources: The Ultimate Guide to Email on Android, 3 Keys to Understanding Email Rendering on Android, and Everything You Need to Know About Gmail Rendering [Webinar].
- (14:10) What’s the best way to add space between bulleted items? The best way to create lists for email is to build an actual table and use padding on the table cells to control spacing.
- (17:45) What are your recommendations for an HTML/CSS compression tool? We recommend HTMLMinifier and minifying by hand to avoid unwanted formatting errors for email clients. Be sure to always keep your HTML emails under 102kb to avoid clipping from Gmail.
- (20:43) Can we email people after they’ve unsubscribed? You should never email users after they have unsubscribed—it’s illegal to do so. Transactional emails (such as receipts, booking confirmations, and other transactions) are the only exception to when it is acceptable to email them again. You can incorporate a little bit of marketing into your transactional emails. We recommend following the 80/20 rule of keeping the content 80% and 20% marketing material as a maximum.
- (24:16) Do search bars work in Outlook? Unfortunately, search bars do not work in Outlook. Search bars will mostly have support in email clients with Webkit rendering engines and we would recommend progressively enhancing for them to only display in those email clients.
- (26:22) What is the ideal email layout width size? It’s long been common to use a 600px wide email layout, but as rendering engines for emails are improving and device size increases, we recommend increasing the scale of your email layout width – we at Litmus have even scaled up emails to 1440px and 1800px wide while still supporting a mobile view.
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