Mobile email clients put to the test
First there were desktop email clients, with their various differing capabilities. Then webmail clients became popular, making a free email address accessible to just about anyone. Today’s biggest growing area is mobile email clients on devices like the iPhone and Blackberry.
When you design and build an email you can’t know for sure which email client will be displaying it for any particular person. To find out the HTML and CSS rendering capabilities of mobile email clients, Gregg Oldring of Mailout Interactive took our email acid test and put it to work.
Gregg has posted his results on his blog and they are well worth checking out. He ran our acid test through a BlackBerry Bold, a BlackBerry Curve, a BlackBerry Pearl, an iPod Touch running the iPhone 2.1 Software Upgrade, an iPhone running 2.2 Software Upgrade, a Treo running Palm OS and a Treo running Windows.
Gregg’s results provide some interesting details - changes in rendering between iPhone software in 2.1 and 2.2 that actually break some parts of our test, for example. He also goes on to make a couple of suggestions for emailing to mobile clients, basically simplifying and reducing the width.
Make sure to click through and see the full mobile email results. Thanks Gregg for your work! If you’ve run your own tests, we’d love to hear about it, please comment below.
How exactly is this acid test done? Is this test aplicable for desktop email clients as well?
@Modern Furniture - it’s an HTML email we’ve prepared that we send to the different clients. See http://www.email-standards.org/acid-test for details.
All our existing results are for desktop and webmail clients, and you can see them at http://www.email-standards.org/clients/
Thank you for sharing all this information. More and more applications exist and no comparison exist, i am very happy to discover your blog!!! cheers
I have tried the Blackberry Bold and I did not find it to be very easy to use. Yes, the push touch screen techology is cool, but overall I was not very impressed. http://www.ceptelefoncu.com
I hope that smartphone really boost now. No more laptop??
http://www.kantoorinrichter.nl
Hey, I have been tracking your blog for some time. Its really inspirational to see you guys go through these troubles to ensure good email standards.
Thanks to you for sharing all that, Olivia
I’m now satisfied with the rendering. But I’m looking forward to clients with plugin-support. I miss it…
Thanks for all of the useful information!!
Acid Test, pretty interesting, was thrown off at first but I’m glad that I read it through, good information and I thank you.
Regards,
Betsy Buchanan
I am looking for a universal standards document that lists only the accepted html/css code for all email clients (including the mobile ones). Does anyone know where I might find such a document?
I know that changes are happening regularly and this is like trying to hit a moving target blindfolded. But all my clients care about is that their email will be readable by the large majority of their audience.
Very good Article, I hope that you will post a update!
I have read this blog a couple of times previously. The posts are fairly attention-grabbing and have something that adds to my knowledge. It’s interesting to find that iphone is better than other heavily advertised phones when it comes to practical use for we webpreneurs.
I also am wondering how the acid test was done. I probably will want to view the results. I am wondering also if I could make use of this type of e-mail software. My work is so demanding I may have to start going mobile with it.
The more we fetch for the perfect phone the more confusing it gets. But anyway iphone seems destined to be the one I’m looking for. Thanks, never thought of such browser issues in mobile phones.
Very nice post. Gregg shure goes into detail on this one. But it’s good to be aware if your making fancy graphical emails.
i am gonna buy a blackberry. that video was so nice
I would like to hear more, still waiting......
Reese Payton