EM1
When is a mail client considered statistically relevant enough to change something for?
Hi,
I thought I was being really clever by showing/hiding an entire table with CSS and media queries. What I was worried about was that gmail (and some others) might ignore that and show both sets of content. Of course, this is exactly what happens. But, less than 5% of our recipients view mail through either of those.
My question then is: what is the industry standard by which the decision to make a change comes into play?
Thanks!
Eric
Eric,
Unless the client is Blackberry, Lotus Notes, or one of the numerous niche email apps, I think its important to deliver a good experience to as many users as possible and Gmail definitely falls within the "should not break" category.
Thankfully there are currently ways to hide content within all the major email clients, although it is not pretty. Here's an example.
However it would really suck if one day one of the major clients made a change that totally removes the ability to hide content.
I agree, all the major clients need supporting or the design needs changing. I don't care for blackberry or Lotus, Close your eyes and pretend they don't exist!
I think for niche markets (which mine is) if you find that a "major client" isn't one, then treat it like a blackberry or some other godawful device. Interestingly enough (or unfortunately enough) I've got more users on Outlook 2003 than Gmail by a factor of 10.
Although, those 2 people viewing our eBlasts on Gmail happen to be in one of our emerging markets which are very important to us. Therefore: they need to be supported.
It is possible to hide things in Gmail - I've found it just requires a bit more "involved" code. I usually inline the following the get any element hidden in Gmail:
display:none; font-size:0; line-height:0; mso-hide: all;max-height: 0; max-width: 0; width:0;
And then use a CSS class to cancel that all out for all other clients, as everything by Gmail reads your standard HTML.
Thanks Justin! I'll give that a shot.
Jaina's approach is similar to what we use to hide preheader/preview text all the time across all email clients. Works fine! No harm in being redundant (no size, no color, no font-size, display:none, etc.) if you want to truly ensure hidden content is exactly that – hidden. My advice: when in doubt, over-code.