What does your email REALLY look like in the inbox?

"Your email looks weird."

"It was fine when I sent it!"

Those who are new to email marketing are often surprised that there is such a huge difference between the way their email design looks when they send it and how it appears to some of their recipients. Commonly, you make a lovely looking email and send it to your boss or client to sign off, and they tell you it looks terrible.

Where did your background image go?

Why has all the text been left aligned and gone blue?

What happened to the animated snow scene?!

This catches out marketers and html designers alike. Marketers because it's the first time they've discovered that emails look very different in a gmail inbox than an Outlook inbox, and designers because they did not realise that all the techniques developed since 1998 have to be abandoned, they cannot use css or background images etc. which are standard tools for the web- alas, inboxes and browsers are not the same.

A word of warning to designers - one tempting solution is to make your email design one big image, allowing you to easily set the appearance exactly as you wish. Don't do it! That will almost certainly get your message blocked as spam and there's no point making a beautiful design that gets junked, but assuming you've jumped through the necessary hoops to avoid the spam filter, your next problem is how to make sure it looks the way you want it to.

The main culprit is Microsoft and to a lesser extent Lotus. As proprietors of Outlook MS insist on rendering emails in such a way that most modern coding is not supported. Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 uses the HTML parsing and rendering engine from Microsoft Office Word 2007 to display HTML message bodies- it does not allow background images, doesn't support animated GIFs, cascading style sheets or margins or cellpadding...

The good news is that if you can get your email to look good in Outlook it will almost certainly look good in other inboxes, but how can you be sure?

The best solution is an inbox previewer, a software tool that will show you how your email design is going to look without the need to get 15 different test addresses and send repeated campaigns to them all. Luckily there are a few out there (ask your email marketing provider, they should have one) to help make sure you know how it's going to appear to your Outlook-using boss before you send it, but unfortunately for the foreseeable future the restrictions on email design are going to remain- Outlook 2010 is planned to work in  the same idiosyncratic way as 2007, so everybody is forced to restrict themselves to simple designs for at least a few more years.