Email Design

Multiple Versions of Gmail

Designing HTML emails for Gmail can be a challenge (e.g. no background images, no cell padding on tables, little respect for web standards, etc), but the situation may be even more complex than you think.

A few weeks ago I was investigating some layout issues with a client’s newsletter in Gmail. What became obvious — following several “it looks fine for me!” type discussions — was that, at any given time, your subscribers could be on multiple versions of Gmail.

The reason for this, it seems, is the sheer size of the Gmail infrastructure, the complexity of the recent upgrade (an entirely new code base), and the number of supported languages (currently 37).

On February 14th, Robby Stein (Associate Product Marketing Manager) made a post on the Gmail Blog, announcing the roll-out of the new version of Gmail targeting Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7. Over two months later, the post was updated with a note saying that they had not yet finished the roll-out.

Finally, on the 5th of May, another update was given announcing that the new version had been completely rolled out.

That’s a pretty huge update and for a while it had me, as an email designer, pulling my hair out. Most of the hassle I encountered was around the new version no longer supporting the cell padding attribute on tables. Not a big deal, but a pain when you have to come up with a quick solution to fix a lot of templates. I might still be pulling my hair out too, because as great as the new features are for end-users, it’s another step in the wrong direction for any kind of standards for email, more obstacles for email designers to navigate, and more limitations to our creative options.

Of course, compared to end-users, the opinions of email designers aren’t very important — but do these changes actually benefit end-users? I’m not sure. In fact, I suspect many user’s reactions were along the lines of “why does my favourites newsletter now look even more mangled than before?”

A final thing to note about this update was that Google Apps users got it on or around the 21st of March, which the Gmail team said was because they “like to listen and learn from users before launching updates to businesses, schools and organizations that use Google Apps”. Which sounds reasonable; let the great unwashed test your software before paying customers or organisations have it unleashed on them.

By the way, if you’re a Google Apps administrator, it’s worth noting that you can get new updates quicker by changing a setting in your domain settings.