email Getting started with email Email Clients and Rendering Engines

Example

Email clients use different rendering engines to render HTML emails:

• Apple Mail, Outlook for Mac, Android Mail and iOS Mail use WebKit
• Outlook 2000/02/03 use Internet Explorer 6
• Outlook 2007/10/13 use Microsoft Word
• Web clients use their browser’s respective engine (e.g. Safari uses WebKit, Chrome uses Blink)

Some clients will also add their own styles on top of yours e.g. Gmail sets all <td> fonts to font-family: arial,sans-serif;, which could impact how an email renders.

Prior to 2016, all Gmail products stripped out <link> tags, any CSS inside <style> tags, and any other CSS that isn’t inlined. In late 2016, Gmail began supporting the <style> tag and media-queries in most of its products. Here is an update as of 23-Nov-2016: