I'm building HTML email templates for a CMS and am wondering if it is possible to define what the preheader of the email is.
The email preheader is the portion of the email that appears right after the email subject on your email provider. Very useful on mobile devices, the user catches a glimpse of what the email is about. It is usually the first text content of the email that defines it.
Currently, on my HTML email design I have a header template, body template and a footer template. And my preheader gets defined by the header template; the first text content that appears is in the header and is the website name/logo, creating redundancy in the email design.
Any ideas of how to get around this?
Sonu Yadav shared the perfect and clever solution to this problem (thanks). And for the sake of documentation, the solution presented on the link shared by Sonu Yadav is below.
Basically, you add the text your want your preheader to be before all content in the <body> tag and use CSS to hide it.
<style>
/* ... */
/*--- Preheader declaration in style block in addition to inline for Outlook */
.preheader { display:none !important; visibility:hidden; opacity:0; color:transparent; height:0; width:0; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<!-- PRE-HEADER TEXT -->
<span class="preheader" style="display: none !important; visibility: hidden; opacity: 0; color: transparent; height: 0; width: 0;">Preheader text shows up in GMail, iOS, Mail.app, & more: 75 text char limit</span>
...
If your logo is the first thing being rendered in your email, the cleanest way (without having to rely on styles) is to place the preheader text in the image alt tag, e.g.:
<img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/my-assets/logo.png" alt="My preheader text." >
Related
I have recently been developing a newsletter for a client of mine. How ever I can't seem to find good information on what css and html are safe to use in the major mail clients.
I thought that maybe there are people here that have the knowledge and we can create some sort of list of things that work in major mail clients.
This is a list of popular mail clients I borrowed from campaign monitor. (If I forgot somthing please tell me)
Microsoft Outlook
Apple Mail
Hotmail
Yahoo! Mail
Gmail
The question is what tags, attributes, special quirks are there in these major browsers and how can they be easily avoided.
Thanks for the help,
There is a detailed and comprehensive list of CSS support in common mail clients at Campaign Monitor.
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
You can find a comprehensive list of supported and non-supported CSS features for all major email clients at Email Standard Project
A really useful bootstrap for developing HTML emails, which has a ton of discrepancy eliminators is HTML Email Bolerplate
And as a general rule - always use tables and all the old-school HTML tags ( align, center, valign, color etc. ). Some reading on the topic.
Here are a couple of posts to get you started:
http://css-tricks.com/using-css-in-html-emails-the-real-story/
http://www.sitepoint.com/code-html-email-newsletters/
Here is an email css cheat-sheet. http://intenseminimalism.com/2010/email-css-cheatsheet/
PDF providing table format for CSS Support in different mail clients:
Gives information for Web Clients, Desktop Clients on Different OS and Mobile Mail Clients.
CSS support by Different Email Clients
https://i3.campaignmonitor.com/assets/files/css/campaign-monitor-guide-to-css-in-email-may-2014.pdf?ver=5320&_ga=1.228308635.745708791.1442556968
Gmail already supports the style tag in the head
You can use a subset of CSS selectors to apply styles. Gmail supports
class, element, and id selectors.
<html>
<head>
<style>
.colored {
color: blue;
}
#body {
font-size: 14px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id='body'>
<p>Hi Pierce,</p>
<p class='colored'>This text is blue.</p=>
<p>Jerry</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
And media queries:
You can use standard CSS media queries to adjust the styling of an email to suit the user's current device. Gmail supports queries against the screen width, orientation, and resolution.
<html>
<head>
<style>
.colored {
color: blue;
}
#body {
font-size: 14px;
}
#media screen and (min-width: 500px) {
.colored {
color:red;
}
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id='body'>
<p>Hi Pierce,</p>
<p class='colored'>
This text is blue if the window width is
below 500px and red otherwise.
</p>
<p>Jerry</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
i have this little but annoying issue displaying text content in the body of the mail. From a form page i send a mail HTML5 formatted.
This is what i sent via mail() php function:
<html>
<head>
<style type='text/css'>
body{
font-family:'Lucida Grande', Arial;
color:#333;
font-size:15px;
}
.div1{ display:inline; }
.row {margin-bottom:5px}
.background {background-color:#ffe508; padding:5px; font-size:18px}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<div class="row">
<div class="div1"><strong>Company:</strong></div><div class="div1">
$company</div></div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
This is what i display on OUTLOOK 2013:
Company:
company_name
It's wrong because i need to display this field on one line as i display fine on WLM
Company:
company_name
i also tried to use table instead of html5 but nothing changes.
Any idea? Thanks
If you don't need the divs, then simply remove them. They don't appear to be doing anything. The line could just be:
<strong>Company:</strong> $company
This means there's nothing which could interfere with this part of the layout.
CSS elements such as float, width and position of <div> doe not work in Outlook.
Div styles not working in Outlook Emails
#ADyson is correct. You don't even need them in your example.
In addition, keep in mind that margin does not work. Margin (capital M) does work. I understand that is not the correct use of Margin, but that's the way Outlook uses it. It's important to remember that email development is not Web development.
https://litmus.com/help/email-clients/outlookcom-margins/
Good luck.
I'm building an app which responds to emails on behalf of my app users. These emails are sent to my users and intercepted by my app to auto-respond to their clients. The emails come from third parties and contain branded formatting.
My PHP app takes the full HTML of the email, stores it in a MySQL table then creates a reply and appends the HTML under a <hr/> at the bottom of the email.
This works and it looks like a reply (which is my intention (although I will build some header detail to make it look more legitimate as if it was replied to in Outlook or similar)).
My problem, however, is that this method hurts the reply formatting - it seems to take on styles like line-height from the original email HTML at the bottom of the reply.
Thus my question is, how do I create a reply email? Do do what I'm doing and style my reply better, or do I need to do more with the complete original, not just the HTML output. And is it even ok to have to HTML tags in an email?
I would love it if the answer was something like: extract the X from the email and build a reply with the opensource Y library :)
EDIT: Email examples as requested
This third party email contains a head that looks like this:
<html>
<head>
<style type='text/css'>
body{font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;}
a{color: #06c;}
p{margin:0;}
#message{width:600px;margin:0 auto;}
.legal{margin-top:2em;}
.footer{margin-top:1em;padding:5px;background:#999999;color:#fff;}
.footer a{color:#fff;}
.senderName,.label{font-weight:bold;}
.link,.label,.hint{margin-top: 20px;}
.header-separator{height:4px;background-color:#e4002b;width:100%;margin-top:17px;}
tr,td{vertical-align:top;text-align:left;}
img{border:0;}
${css!""}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id='message'>
...
And my user email templates (built in TinyMCE) will look something like this:
<p><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 14pt;">Dear [name],</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 14pt;">Thanks for your enquiry
...
When I send the email to the email service it's as simple:
$emailreply = $userTemplate . '<hr/>' . $originalEnquiry;
Surely, that's not good enough? Also, this is the email that I mentioned where line-height is being affected - so my user templates are not sending as designed.
It's kinda rare the case on the 3rd party email, having separated <style > tag when the usual procedure on HTML email development is to set up all styles inline.
It's kinda logical that those styles (from the <style > tag are damaging your new code, The best option here is to make all that styling (from the 3rd party email) inline, so you can remove the <style > tag, keeping both email styling separated.
As you said PHP App, I think you can use some of the following:
https://github.com/tijsverkoyen/CssToInlineStyles
https://github.com/jjriv/emogrifier
https://github.com/emilsundberg/Laravel-HTML-email-inliner/blob/master/src/Emil/Inliner/vendor/Premailer/Premailer.php
And make sure, if the chosen one of the above tools doesn't remove the <style>...</style> tag, remove it by yourself (you can do it using regular expressions).
Hope this helps, good luck
I have wordpress sidebar with:
<h3 class="widget-title">TITLE OF SIDEBAR</h3>
and I need show small icon before "TITLE OF SIDEBAR. Can I do with CSS?
Or I must manually add image into code? like:
<h3 class="widget-title"><img src="">TITLE OF SIDEBAR</h3>
Pseudo elements will do what you want. Using the :before pseudo element, your CSS would look like this:
h3.widget-title:before {
content: url('/path/to/image');
}
This will place an image before the text content of the <h3>, however this won't change the DOM at all which is important to note.
A good explanation of how pseudo elements work can be found here, on CSS Tricks.
If your image is 10px wide, you could try this:
.widget-title {
background: url(smallicon.png) left top no-repeat;
padding-left: 10px;
}
Keep your h3 tag without including img tag, and do the following:
h3.widget-title {
position: relative;
padding-left: <width of the icon image>;
}
h3.widget-title:before {
content: '';
width: <width value>;
height: <height value>;
position: absolute;
left: 0;
display: block;
background: url(<path of the icon image>) no-repeat;
}
.widget-title:before {
content: url(path/to/image.png);
}
You can find more information at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/content.
h3:before {
content: url('https://www.google.com/images/srpr/logo4w.png')
}
Sample http://jsfiddle.net/KCXVM/
Yes, you can do it in CSS.
Simply use the :before pseudo-selector, like this:
widget-title:before {
content:url('imagename.png');
}
Or, of course, use h3:before { ... } for it to apply to all h3 elements.
Here's a working example for you
Browser compatibility: This works in all common browsers, except IE7 or earlier.
Why not simply apply the image as a background?
.widget-title {
background: url(...) no-repeat 50% 0;
padding-left: 20px;
}
So, at first, I thought a <span> thing would work.
Then, I tried this, and it worked seamlessly:
h3:before{
content: url('your url');
}
You can add icon before each h3 heading in CSS by following these ways below (via OIW Blog):
- Use Glyphicons of Bootstrap
If you are using Bootstrap then you can use Glyphicons to add icons to the desired title or text.
Bootstrap contains a diverse set of icons, to pick up a suitable icon you can take a look at here: https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/components/. Once choosing a desired icon, adding it to theme is a piece of cake. You just need to add the card after the location that you want your icon to be displayed
<span class="glyphicon glyphicon-ok"></span>
Notice that the icon I added is “ok” so its class shall be “glyphicon-ok”. Each icon (in the list I mentioned above) is compatible to a different class.
- Use icons of existing Cheatsheet of the currently used Font or third party
If your website don’t use Bootstrap or the current set of icons of Bootstrap doesn’t meet your need (despite containing a lot) (Glyphicons of bootstrap has displaying errors on IE10 of Window Phone OS). After that you can check what font of the website you are using is and find out if it has an icons Cheatsheet library or not. For example: Elusiveicons, Fontisto, Material Design… are some of the fonts that have icons Cheatsheet which are for immediate use.
If your currently used font of the website has Icons Cheatsheet then you can have a set of icons of the third party. Here I would like to introduce “Font Awesome Icons”. This is a good-looking and popular set of icons.
To use this set of cons, you need to add this code to the head section in your website:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://use.fontawesome.com/releases/v5.0.13/css/all.css" integrity="sha384-DNOHZ68U8hZfKXOrtjWvjxusGo9WQnrNx2sqG0tfsghAvtVlRW3tvkXWZh58N9jp" crossorigin="anonymous">
– After adding CSS, you can use this code to put in the HTML which shows icons (you can apply this method to the part you use Cheatsheet of the font as mentioned above. Some fonts have unique way of using)
<i class="fa fa-edit"></i>
– If you don’t want the code in the HTML, you can just use CSS. With CSS you need to find the Class or ID of the part that displays icon and after that use the below CSS code to display it. Here I display the EDIT icon of the third party “Font Awesome Icons” before (::before) the title, along with 2 properties of padding-right and font-style (you can also display it after the title by using after property):
span.last-updated-time::before {
font-family: "FontAwesome";
content: "\f044";
padding-right: 5px;
font-style: normal;
}
Notice: the code of content is hexadecimal code. You can find and replace it with the code of the currently used icon. With “Font Awesome Icons” you can find it here: https://fontawesome.com/cheatsheet
I am sending a email using form values. I created email template using so many css classes. When I sent email, found that no one class is applied in email template.
I search for solution of this issue but not found satisfactory answer. Is any one know, how to apply css classes for email template.
I am using CodeIgniter framework and creating email in a action "sendemail". Here is sample code.
<style>
.head{
border: 2px solid black;
padding: 5px;
}
</style>
<div class='head'>
Hello World !
</div>
Please let me know if there is any solution.
In email templates css classes will not affect you have write inline style to html tags like
<div style='border: 2px solid black;padding:5px;'>Hello World !</div>