I'd use divs. Make sure you avoid any external / internal css though. Use something like: <p style="font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; font-family: Verdana; color: #333333">Some text</p> etc. Skip on videos or large graphics too. PS Forgot to mention. Avoid using javascript or jquery in your templates. Anything containing javascript is automatically marked as spam by 99% of email providers.
I'd be one of the people recommending tables email programs are blunt instruments and really prefer old school html with inline styles Try with divs but test on a variety of email clients Consider your target market and think about what they'll be using to read your email... hotmail, gmail or Outlook Express 2000
Unfortunately, this is where I'd also recommend tables for HTML email (well, I wouldn't recommend HTML-email to begin with, but hey) OR using an image - an image will show up in most clients, and you can provide a simple link to "View this on the web" for those who doesn't show images by default.
One BIG thing to remember is that most e-mail clients ignore CSS for anything more than colouration -- AND EVEN THEN cannot be relied upon. You cannot rely on HALF of HTML 4 even working in them, and this includes fairly recent clients like Thunderbird, much less the plethora of older agents people are still using like Eudora and Outlook, much less how webmail nebfers the content. Thanks to these limitations common to mail clients, you are basically stuck using HTML 3.2 with only a handful of 4 tranny tags being supported -- and that means dialing the clock back to all the pre-strict formatting habits as you basically have to pretend that the <style> tag doesn't exist, the style="" attribute does not exist... and that means for a complex layout you're GOING to HAVE to use tables. That "<p style="font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; font-family: Verdana; color: #333333">Some text</p>" @qwikad.com posted? IGNORED in a LOT of still in use mail clients. PERSONALLY I think there's no legitimate reason to EVER send E-mail as HTML. MANY mail services are configured to automatically send any mail that's "HTML Only" direct to their trash. IF you go this route, send as multipart so you can have a plaintext equivalent in addition to your goofy HTML version otherwise you're gonna get auto-flagged as SPAM -- a LOT! Fancy formatted HTML e-mails are a train wreck that is invariably broken somewhere, and pretty much just screams "look at me, I'm SPAM!!!" -- my advice? Just don't do it! You want some fancy formatted page, make it as a page on a website and just put the URL of that page into a plaintext mail. Anything more complex than that is going to be rejected as SPAM for about a third the people out there, be embarassingly broken for another third, and simply piss off the remainder of folks out there. NOT that I'm pulling numbers out my backside on that, that's a guesstimate, but an educated one.
How do yahoo and gmail do this? You know how they have their own editors and stuff. If you send it from either one of them to the other one using the editors the email gets received in the design and colors you applied to it. If you inspect the elements it will look something like: <b><font color="#FF0000;">Somet text</font></b>. However if you send this code by itself you will not get the results you want. Looks like, somewhere in their inbox page, they use their own .css to make an email appear like it was intended to appear.
A LOT of webmail clients filter the markup in HTML e-mails and substitute their own. This is done for security reasons in an attempt to block cross-site scripting exploits and other methods of screwing with accounts. They'll filter out scripts and scripting attributes, wholesale replace elements in an attempt to make the mail appear as designed despite not preserving the markup. Can drive you NUTS when it does not appear as designed because of their rewrite -- and is the same reason a number of mail clients block HTML e-mails entirely or just show the flat markup escaped instead. (which looks SO great BTW -- not. Normal people seeing markup == confused normal people) Interestingly most mails sent to me FROM gmail or Y! go straight to my spam box, gee -- wonder why. Guess that goes hand in hand with why I don't use gmail -- half my legitimate mails go to the spam box, and another quarter bounce without so much as a warning to the sender or recipient. I really don't get how people actually use gmail given what a buggy broken train wreck of slow loading painful scripttardery it is. Sadly that describes most webmail at this point. Sad as a decade ago I thought webmail would spell the death of mail clients, now with the scripttardery, painfully slow speed and agonizingly bad ignorance of accessibility they've managed to send me running and screaming back to Thunderbird and/or Opera M2.
HTML Emails a pain in the ass. You have to Tables, inline-styles, lots of html styling attributes. 90% of code you'd write on a website wont work in email. Checkout stuff that works here: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ You also have to test your email in 50 different email clients. Get a free trial of http://litmus.com/ or https://www.emailonacid.com/ Be sure to keep your email with in 100k~ (or somewhere around there). I forget the exact size limit but anymore and your email with have the three dots to show the email in gmail (hidden by default)
Eh, what? There will DEFINITELY be a difference for the users - depending on what client they're using. As @deathshadow has pointed out in great detail, different clients support different content, but NONE OF THEM support a proper HTML-rendering engine.
I don't see any comparison between them while creating email templates. They are specially used for building tables . For email you can use a a form or plain template.
I was about to say "Could somebody translate that into ENGLISH for me?" -- seems to be more and more of a problem here, many of the posts of late having worse language than the average "Paypal account status" spam.