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Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

755 points| fagnerbrack | 1 year ago |caniemail.com

250 comments

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[+] ryanbigg|1 year ago|reply
What an excellent resource! (And yes Outlook is a pain and supports so very little!)

We've tried building email templates for notifications for our apps where I work, and it has typically been a pain. We have since swapped to using mjml (https://mjml.io/) to build the templates, and it's working wonders. The output seems the be the most compatible with all different devices that we've tested on.

The other tool we enjoy using is Litmus (https://litmus.com), which allows you to throw in an email template and see what it looks like on all kinds of apps and devices. Other thread here mentions https://testi.at/ as well, which we've also had success with.

All of these have been really invaluable to designing emails for our apps.

[+] dabber|1 year ago|reply
mjml looks really interesting, thanks for sharing. I wish there was a business reason for orgs to care about accessable and machine readable (I guess OCR is a thing now but still) emails.

I've been using Foundation for Emails[1] for the very small number of emails that I've worked on which required more than just a list of img tags, and I really appreciate it for existing because HTML emails have been stuck in ie6 web days.

[1]: https://get.foundation/emails.html

[+] shortformblog|1 year ago|reply
MJML is easily the best tool of its kind and I use it a lot. If anyone is trying to build emails in 2024, it's a major shortcut that helps avoid and mitigate some of HTML email’s biggest headaches.
[+] chrisldgk|1 year ago|reply
While we‘re here I‘d also like to recommend react-email[1] which I‘ve been using for building emails for a while now. The components it offers are more than enough and it‘s definitely better than building mails with <!—MSO—> tags every five lines like we did back in my email marketing days.

[1] https://react.email

[+] almost|1 year ago|reply
Thank you so much for linking testi.at. I’ve been looking for an affordable alternative to Litmus!
[+] rjzzleep|1 year ago|reply
> What an excellent resource! (And yes Outlook is a pain and supports so very little!)

So outlook today is the internet explorer of mail?

[+] cchance|1 year ago|reply
Holy shit all of those are awesome links, I'm working on an internal tool and i like to have clean looking notification and alert emails but its a FUCKING NIGHTMARE because everyone uses either Gmail or Outlook and both handle everything so poorly and... weirdly. And oh my god having to use tables... so many tables.
[+] morgunkorn|1 year ago|reply
Hilarious anecdote about this website: the owner once said there are tons of entries in the usage log of people misunderstanding the purpose of the website and inputting celebrities names to try to email them. :D
[+] userbinator|1 year ago|reply
The lower the score, the better. I know many who have a policy of "emails must be in plaintext only, with no attachments unless agreed to in advance; everything else gets deleted automatically."
[+] shortformblog|1 year ago|reply
Expand your group of people, because you clearly don’t know enough people.
[+] yyyk|1 year ago|reply
There's a good case for expanding slightly on plaintext. It's not just decorative - some usecases like Right-to-Left or lists or linked are helped by a little markup, and HTML is good enough.

The problem is going overboard on CSS (maybe none should be allowed) or allowing any javascript at all. I can't recall any email security issue ever which is HTML only without any CSS or javascript.

[+] jimbobthrowawy|1 year ago|reply
I know at least two people who send emails where the HTML version is either blank or tells the recipient to stop using a bloated client, and the actual email content is in the plaintext fallback. I think I had to look at the email source in thunderbird to read them.
[+] whoisthemachine|1 year ago|reply
The two most popular clients, Gmail and Outlook, are ranked at 25 and 41 (the bottom) respectively.
[+] tgv|1 year ago|reply
When I look at the features gmail doesn't support, I see things like "display: none", animation, and other kinds of css which arguably shouldn't be part of an email. The basics are there, so that makes high ranking not necessarily a good target.
[+] jolmg|1 year ago|reply
That's reminiscent of IE, being the most popular and underfeatured.
[+] idle_zealot|1 year ago|reply
A fully-featured HTML "document" is really an application, not a document at all, so it makes sense that mail clients limit support. But this fragmentation makes me yearn for a real standard here, an official non-application subset of HTML that doesn't allow fetching remote resources or executing code. Just a document format with embedded media, animations, styling, etc.
[+] social_quotient|1 year ago|reply
Is it a “document” if it has animations and non static (video) media?
[+] pyrale|1 year ago|reply
Quite honestly, people have no business sending me code to execute or resources to fetch.

I get that adtech is interested in using my email as their billboard, but they can fuck right off. Plaintext + attachments or gtfo.

[+] Julesman|1 year ago|reply
I think it would be more useful to list the few CSS properties that all email clients do recognize. I don't mean to be flippant. I'm serious.

CanIEmail? The answer is generally no.

[+] SigmundurM|1 year ago|reply
If you go to this page: https://www.caniemail.com/clients/

and select "check all", it'll show you the features that are supported by all the email clients, and separately, which features have mixed support.

These appear to be the few features supported by all clients:

- border-collapse

- font shorthand

- list-style-type

- cm unit

- em unit

- ex unit

- in unit

- mm unit

- pc unit

- % unit

- pt unit

- px unit

- vertical-align

- <del> element

- <div> element

- <h1> to <h6> elements

- <hr> element

- <img> element

- <p> element

- <pre> element

- <span> element

- <strong> element

- <table> element

- valign attribute

- JPG image format

- PNG image format

[+] ceejayoz|1 year ago|reply
I thought this'd be one of those novelty sites that just say "No." in a big font.
[+] kcrwfrd_|1 year ago|reply
Dark mode support in email is one of the most frustrating things I’ve dealt with as a frontend dev who’s been coding since the IE6 days.

Basically you have to accept that you must only implement a light mode design and choose colors that will look okay when automatically inverted by all of the shoddy dark mode email client implementations.

Gmail is one of the worst offenders. You have zero recourse for picking your own colors for dark mode.

[+] Eric_WVGG|1 year ago|reply
HTML email was such a tragic mistake.

I think the whole mess could have been averted if Markdown had been invented about twenty years earlier.

[+] langsoul-com|1 year ago|reply
Non proper and standard HTML email was and still is a mistake.

You're really rolling a dice on what may work, even if it's valid HTML

[+] zzzkkk|1 year ago|reply
Is this intended as sarcasm? Markdown renders to html, it's an authoring syntax that happens to be readable in it's "code" state. How would it solve email?

The real issue is bespoke rendering engines instead of just using a rule of "everything the current browser can do, but no js".

[+] kivlad|1 year ago|reply
The new Outlook desktop client is awful, but there's one silver lining and it's the retirement of the even more awful Word HTML renderer.
[+] chrismorgan|1 year ago|reply
Are you sure? I have a vague recollection of someone confirming late last year that it was still MSO. But I may be mistaken.
[+] croes|1 year ago|reply
MS did it on purpose for security reasons
[+] FigurativeVoid|1 year ago|reply
I was using this for a feature I was working on last week.

That’s when I learned gmail doesn’t support SVG???? That seems like a huge miss.

[+] eqvinox|1 year ago|reply
Isn't AMP considered an antifeature these days? Last I heard even Google had abandoned it — but this is outside my zone of expertise, so I might be wrong?
[+] shortformblog|1 year ago|reply
AMP for email is a bit different of a beast. It works a lot differently from the web version and is used essentially to add interactivity to the email. If you use Google Docs, it’s what allows you to directly reply to a comment in your inbox.
[+] dubcanada|1 year ago|reply
It’s still quite wildly on websites. But it doesn’t even have support for GA4 yet. It’s probably dead just not yet on the dead list.
[+] dustedcodes|1 year ago|reply
I can't figure out how to use it.

When I enter "<a href="https://example.org>Test</a>" it says "No results found. Why not suggest this feature to be added?".

When I enter "<a>" I get "AMP for email", "BIMI", "accent-color" and lots of other CSS attributes starting with "a" as result.

When I enter "a" I get the same as above.

How do I check if I can email the HTML Anchor tag? The input says "HTML, CSS, ..." but it doesn't seem to understand HTML unless I'm doing it wrong?

[+] nedt|1 year ago|reply
You might have been unlucky searching for the a element that's really short. And very basic HTML would work everywhere. But you might be more happy to go via the feature list: https://www.caniemail.com/features/
[+] kwhitefoot|1 year ago|reply
No Thunderbird on Linux, Windows, etc.? Is it different on MacOS?
[+] EyebrowsWhite|1 year ago|reply
I use plain text, and I even enable "block external image" on the client, and I would advise others to do the same, because there is just too much phishing with email..
[+] palata|1 year ago|reply
I like plaintext better (https://useplaintext.email/).

And emails can totally be sent both as plaintext and HTML, so that the receiver can choose! I just don't understand why so many services only send a text/html version instead of both text/html and text/plain.

[+] Liskni_si|1 year ago|reply
Quite a lot of services send both… and the text/plain version is completely different. They used to be the same many years ago, but then whoever is in charge of changing the email template only changes the text/html variant, and keeps the text/plain content stuck in the old times. It'd be almost funny if it wasn't tragic.