Not much, unfortunately, if you manage any given email database that contains non-mac users.

I don't know if this means it's time for more competing space in offline mailclients because we're seeing a shift to the in-browser emailclients.

Accompanied with that shift moving to HTML5 & CSS3 compliant browsers is priority #1, as always.

Definitely email clients need to evolve. It's ridiculous that I still have to build email newsletters with table designs because CSS is not well supported. And in this field GMail is actually terrible, not even supporting well the background attributes... sigh.

You ever try supporting Lotus Notes? GMail is a comparative walk in the park.

Testing on lotusapp.com only gets you so far.

I don't think thats the site you meant (lotusapp.com is non english)

Doh! http://litmusapp.com/

I get that things should be well presented and that campaign monitor is a designer facing service, but am I the only one that uses and likes gmail's default "never load images" feature? I like pure text emails because pure text emails tend to actually be useful and not marketing spam.

Obviously it depends a lot on your audience, but I would argue technically minded folk are smart enough to be jaded by fantastically designed marketing spam, and non-tech folk may like the pretty pictures but also would take a text-only email to be more credible/personal in that it looks as if someone actually wrote it to you!

This is from a pure marketing perspective though, anyone have any numbers for either side?

Most of what the article shows is stuff that works with images turned off. In fact the first technique they show is specifically for that case.

You can learn that attention to detail can really pay off. And that's true even if your users are not Mac aficionados.

That trick with the forward slashes is awesome. Now I'm trying to think of other cool designs that can be done using just large, cropped text.