I can’t tell you how many broken emails I receive from brands that should know better or, at the very least, have the resources to do better. The latest in box fail came by way of Intuit, whose developers over-complicated the most simple of templates. The result was a hideous mess of misaligned background colors and borders and a split text image (?) just for bad measure.
I’m not saying that coding HTML for email isn’t tricky, but no one should be seeing things like this in their Gmail in boxes running the latest version of Chrome on Win 7 64-bit. A basic amount of email client and browser testing would have revealed code incompatibilities that could easily have been remedied in such a basic layout.
If you can’t tell, this is an auto-generated email that’s sent out after someone makes a significant change to their account info. Regardless of whether or not a human saw this before it went out, the template should have been iron-clad long before being made available to whatever email system they use to spit these out (their smtp server appears to belong to Rackspace). There’s certainly nothing in the merge data that should have made such a mess.
