In general, I’m not a huge fan of sending HTML emails. If you signed up to receive emails from me you might find that surprising – especially if you are pretty seasoned and know how to tell the difference between a pure text email and an HTML email made to look like pure text.

It is true that almost every email that goes out is sent with an accompanying HTML one but I do not go fancy with it. Not like these:

Must admit sometimes it is tempting to get creative like that. They look so nice.

This week, I thought I’d buck the trend a little and send out a nicely formatted email. Before doing that though I decided to find out if I could use HTML5 in my emails. From experience, I know that email clients are still not as sophisticated as browsers when it comes to HTML display. There are some snazzy stuff that you can’t do, external stylesheets don’t work (as of time of writing) and positioning stuff  in your design is still best done using tables – yes, you read that right. Tables.

In short, there is some art and science to coding HTML emails. Those of us familiar with web design need to step back a little bit when it comes to HTML emails while HTML doesn’t change, but just like working with different browsers, HTML clients can be picky.

Well, I found a ton of good information, much of it new to me. What I liked most – there’s a lot more good information out there on HTML in emails. Best of all, to save me a boat load of time figuring out what I can or can’t do in my HTML email, I found boiler plates freely downloadable and ready to use so all I did was pump in my content, edit out the HTML parts I didn’t need and made adjustments. The result was great.

Here’s a short list of what I found. If you’re thinking of creating HTML emails and want to make sure they are coded the right way, start with these first.

• HTML Boilerplate
• Emailology
• Mailchimp HTML Blueprints