If it's non-transparent then it's ugly (white box). For example, say you include an basic black on white icon, what happens if the user is using dark mode? If the image is transparent, it becomes entirely invisible. Just the tag - and even there you'll run into differences if you try and use the alt attribute.Īnd even that isn't trivial. If you just want text and images, you don't need CSS. I try and keep my email templates very sparse, clean and simple and I generally haven’t had too many issues with reply/forward formatting (that I’m aware of). But the other thing to consider is whether the email template is just trying to do too much. Part of me thinks we’re fighting a losing battle here anyway so there is a limit to how much time it’s worth spending to make sure even replies are formatted nicely across all clients. I see also a lot of mentions on this thread about replying to emails breaking the layout. To just get the job done though, MJML is highly recommended.
So if I was spending more time doing this sort thing, I might be more inclined to move down an abstraction level back to HTML/CSS and improve my knowledge of various client support. That said I don’t specialise in email, it’s something I do “when I need to”. This is a problem area where a good abstraction framework is highly useful in my opinion. I agree, I’ve had pretty good results using MJML now for several years (and I’ve been doing HTML emails since almost the 90’s!)