Opera Mini (can be installed on any mobile device and there are an estimated 30 million active users).

Mobile Safari (comes standard on the iPhone OS).

The standard web browser is Mobile Safari

Android – Acquired by Google and built on a Linux based platform.

E-mail program is from the Pocket Outlook Suite and is similar to Outlook (assuming version 03). Applications are Internet Explorer and MS Reader.

Windows Mobile (aka Pocket PC, Pocket PC Phone Edition, and Smartphone) – Made by Microsoft and built on the Windows CE operating system.

Palm OS (aka Garnet or Cobalt) – Made by PalmSource.

Here is a list of popular mobile device operating systems:

There are currently 40 different handheld applications for web browsing. Although users are more likely to use the email application that comes with their device operating system, others may prefer to check their web based email through their handheld web browser. To make matters even more complicated, some users may use their mobile devices to retrieve their email. Well, for the hard core testers out there, let’s enter into the realm of mobile device email… Testing HTML Email on Mobile Devices Find the email test in your archive and preview the email in each client there as well. Then open Internet Explorer and log into your Email on Acid account once again.Make sure you are satisfied with the way your email will render in each client by using our email previews feature. Using Firefox, log into your Email on Acid account and run a simulation of your email in the top 15, most popular email clients.Then, if possible, test on your iPhone or one of the iPhone simulators listed below. Test your email in each of the popular web browsers, including older versions of Internet Explorer.So the question is: What is the best strategy for testing your email to ensure it will render correctly in all of the popular email clients?

In the end, there are a multitude of different ways in which your email might be received which makes testing much more difficult than testing a standard web page. AOL, on the other hand, uses an iframe to display your email.Īs you already know, each of these web browsers vary when it comes to following W3C standards, rendering coding errors, and displaying blocked images, ALT, and TITLE tags. Therefore, you must compete with their default CSS. Since users can open their web based email from any of the popular web browsers, we have to focus less on the embedded “rendering engine” and more on how your email 1.) looks in every popular web browser and 2.) gets interpreted by each email client.įor example: Gmail sets very strict restrictions on embedded CSS, whereas Hotmail uses an outdated doc type which may alter the way your images and text will render.Īs if that wasn’t enough, your email will render inside the Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail user interface.

Web based email clients present an entirely different challenge. * The version of IE that is used to render your email depends on what the user has installed on their local machine. In order to control potential spam and spyware threats, each client then sets restrictions on supported HTML, CSS and scripting elements. Desktop Email ClientsĮach desktop client uses an embedded rendering engine in order to display your email. In taking into account the complexity of testing your email, we must first consider the most popular email applications used today. Although our email testing simulation is intended to make your life much easier, it is still vitally important to test your email in each of the popular web browsers as well.

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