The Email Wars

How many of you have played around with changing the look and feel of the gmail client to allow a custom background image in the inbox. The ability to now skin your own email client is cool and I have done so on my own gmail account, but these past few weeks we have seen some rendering challenges with email campaigns sent to this ISP due to these custom backgrounds.

Now at first I figured that it would not have an impact on the actual area where the email renders, but with some client templates we have noticed some challenges. Now not all campaign creative designs have been impacted, but we have found that those with dark backgrounds in some of the default choices gmail gives users one can sometimes have an issue. What occurs is if you have a dark background in your email creative and a dark skin applied in your inbox it can create a blur between the email and the actual rendering space making an impact on the email creative itself.

This is a not a horrible issue, but for those that care about how an email looks it is worth considering a plan if you have a large user base using gmail as an email client. What we have found helps to solve this is to build either a different version to those using gmail OR to build a style sheet that can detect the email client and change out the background image to a lighter color that allows it to not bleed or blur into the inbox.

Just a little heads up to test this out and see if your program has this challenge as the last thing you want is to have a bad experience when you are trying to get some action on your campaigns.