Best Practices for Email Creation

Modern CSS techniques such as Flexbox and Grid are not supported by many email clients (especially Outlook).

👉 Tables are the only reliable way to structure columns, rows, and spacing in email layouts.

Unlike in web design, <div> elements are often only partially supported in emails.

👉 Properties such as padding, margin, and width may be ignored or interpreted incorrectly, which can lead to broken or inconsistent layouts.

Email clients often ignore the width of the body element.

👉 Without fixed pixel widths, your layout may expand, shrink, or shift unpredictably.

Best Practice: Use fixed widths for each content block (e.g., 600 px).

Percentage-based values can behave differently across email clients and browsers.

👉 A two-column layout intended to display at a 50:50 ratio may suddenly render as 60:40 — or even worse.

Best Practice: Use fixed pixel values for precise control over your layout.

Even technically well-built emails can render differently depending on the email client. Images, background effects, dark mode, and interactive elements in particular require extra attention.

Many email clients partially or completely ignore <style> blocks.

👉 Important styles such as fonts, colors, and spacing should be defined directly within each HTML element using inline CSS.

Relying on inherited styles in emails is risky.

👉 Some email clients do not correctly pass styles from parent elements to their child elements.

Margins are among the most unreliable CSS properties in email design.

👉 Some email clients ignore them, others override them, and some add their own default margins.

Best Practice:

• Always set margin: 0; inline.
• Use padding or structured spacing between table cells instead of margins whenever possible.

By default, most email clients force links to appear blue and underlined.

👉 This can negatively impact the consistency of your design.

Best Practice:

• Add a global fallback style to define the appearance of links.
• Override the styling for specific links inline when necessary.

To conclude, let’s look at a few technical details that often have a significant impact on how emails are actually rendered across different email clients. Outlook-specific considerations, button implementation, and mobile optimization in particular should be taken into account early in the development process.

Images without fixed dimensions can render very differently depending on the email client.

👉 They may appear stretched, oversized, or extremely small.

Best Practice:
Always define at least one dimension—either width or height—and ideally both.

Support for background images is highly inconsistent across email clients, especially in Outlook.

👉 Text placed over background images is often difficult to read or may not render correctly at all.

Best Practice:
Whenever possible, incorporate the text directly into the graphic itself rather than overlaying HTML text on top of an image.

Every email client handles Dark Mode differently.

👉 Colors may be automatically inverted, backgrounds can change, and media queries are often ignored.

Best Practice:
Use strong color contrasts and simple designs, avoid backgrounds that provide poor contrast with foreground elements, and test your logos and buttons across different email clients.

Effects such as :hover states and animated interactions are often not supported in email environments.

👉 Buttons and links should always function properly without relying on interactive effects.

Best Practice:
Ensure that content, buttons, and navigation remain fully visible and usable even when hover effects or animations are not supported.

So far, we’ve covered the fundamentals of email layouts, email design best practices, and common visual rendering challenges. To conclude this series, we’ll focus on a few implementation details that can have a major impact on how your emails are displayed across different email clients.

Here are four essential techniques every email developer should know:

Many email clients remove the padding applied to <a> tags, causing well-designed buttons to degrade into simple text links.

👉 Build buttons using a small table structure and place the link inside it.

Best Practice:
Use the table cell (<td>) to control spacing, background color, borders, and dimensions. The <a> tag should primarily be responsible for the text styling.

Some email clients, particularly Outlook, only recognize a link as clickable if it contains a valid href attribute.

👉 Even placeholder links should contain a proper URL or at least a #.

Best Practice:
Never leave the href attribute empty when testing or building email templates.

Outlook remains one of the most challenging email clients because it uses Microsoft Word to render HTML.

👉 As a result, standard HTML and CSS often behave differently than expected.

Best Practice:
Use Outlook-specific wrappers and MSO conditional comments to ensure that widths, spacing, and images are rendered consistently across Outlook versions.

Unlike modern websites, table-based email layouts do not automatically adapt to smaller screens.

👉 Without responsive design, emails can become difficult to read on mobile devices.

Best Practice:
Use dedicated mobile classes and media queries to stack columns, resize content, and improve readability on smartphones.