After a week of angst as Google appeared to be rolling out changes in some Gmail accounts that strip CSS with background images it appears Google has acknowledged the issue and is rolling the change back. This must be a huge relief for email developers who are dreading the many wasted hours combing through templates to address this issue. Background Sometime last week, many email developers started noticing that emails in Gmail webmail started looking weird and it turned out that for a subset of Gmail accounts, if the email contained inline CSS or embedded CSS (<style>) with background-i ..read more

Update: Mark Robbins has posted a bug report on the Google Issue Tracker. (Make sure to click on +1 to let Google know you’re impacted too). Gmail appears to be in the middle of rolling out changes that strip all embedded or inline CSS in certain Webmail accounts if it contains any background image CSS code. Currently only a handful of Gmail Webmail accounts are seeing this issue so its unclear if Gmail will continue to roll out this change or they will roll it back once they realize the gravity of this issue. Kudos to Alice Li from Zillow as she was the first to document this issue. Backgrou ..read more

By now the topic of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection change for the upcoming iOS 15 is on everyone’s lips.  A Brief Overview On June 7, during Apple’s WWDC21 conference, it announced Mail Privacy Protection for their Mail app on iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey devices, set to launch between September and November of this year. According to Apple’s press release, “Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email and masks their IP address so it ..read more

During this year’s Apple WWDC conference, Apple announced an upcoming feature for iOS 15 that will be available for iOS devices called Mail Privacy Protection. One of the major features of Mail Privacy Protection is that images will be downloaded in the background 一 even without the email being read by the recipient, rendering open tracking moot. This is because open tracking is based on having an image pixel being loaded when a recipient opens the email. I wrote some observations on what I found out through this testing in this article: A Technical Take on iOS15 Mail Privacy Protection ..read more

Businesses that use email marketing use it explicitly to promote deals and product launches. However, they often ignore transactional emails which should be a fundamental part of their email marketing strategy. These are emails that are often overlooked as boring or unimportant, and marketers avoid spending much time and effort in planning and creating these emails. So, what is a transactional email? Transactional emails are messages sent to users in response to certain actions taken by them on your website or application. These emails are personalized and triggered in a way that the right me ..read more

Two years ago Gmail launched email annotations for Promotions tab. This allows emails to feature a prominent image along with accompanying labels for offers beneath the subject line of the email in the Gmail App. At launch, Gmail only featured the annotated emails on the top two spots in a special “Top Deals” section in the Promotions tab. This meant only a few emails were displayed with these special features at a time. Annotations are appearing in the main list… randomly. Originally, the remaining emails in the Promotions tab list (under the header Remaining Promotions) did not display the ..read more

Have you always wanted a quick and easy way to test your emails in dark mode without having to send a test to your device? Good news! I built a Dark Mode for Email Simulator. Check the legibility of your text, logo and icons in Dark Mode With this tool, you are able to detect places where, for example, you originally have light text over a dark background image and then find out that in dark mode, your text will turn dark while the background will remain dark, making your recipients unable to read the text. It will also show you if your logo and icons lose contrast when your email is read in d ..read more

Many brands and retailers are still sending emails with images that are loading through HTTP. However, the next Google Chrome update (Chrome 81) will cause emails with images loaded over HTTP (vs HTTPS) to no longer show up in some webmail providers. This will mainly affect Outlook.com and Xfinity’s webmail service, as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail use proxies that “auto-upgrade” HTTP images to HTTPS. The reason Google is doing this comes down to security as mixing HTTPS (secure) and HTTP (non-secure) content can compromise privacy and security without a user knowing. This article on ProofJump covers ..read more

Gmail unveiled yesterday a slew of new features for the Promotion Tab in their iOS and Android Gmail app. Technically some of these changes have been out for a while as early as as April of this year. In fact, Jordan Grossman, Google’s Product Manager of Gmail and Gmail ads gave a presentation on these features at the DDMA Email Summit in Netherlands back in July. The new features include Single Image Previews, Deal Badges and Custom Logos although Jordan’s presentation also covered several “upcoming” features such as Topic Bundles and Catalog Cards. Google terms these features as Annotatio ..read more

Gmail released a new set of Promotion Tab features yesterday that included a sender customized preview called PromotionCard, custom logos and deal badges. See here for the overview. I’ve created a simple tool to help you generate the markup required to display the features when your email is featured in the Top Promotions section in Gmail’s Promotion Tab (Note there is no guarantee that your email will be featured). Try the Promotion Tab Markup Tool. Subscribe to the #EmailGeeks Newsletter Subscribe ..read more