is there a style reset for email clients?

css email html-email email-client
rwcorbett picture rwcorbett · Apr 16, 2013 · Viewed 7.3k times · Source

I design my emails with the general styling rules outlined elsewhere on the web (i.e. Campaign Montior's CSS guide http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/) and apply only inline styles (I find this more reliable than placing them in the <head> section as some clients ignore <style>).

Does anyone know if there is a reliable way to effectively reset styles in most major email clients (Outlook 2007 and up, Gmail, Thunderbird, etc)? Something to cover at least the major desktop and mobile clients (http://emailclientmarketshare.com/). Ideally a solution that can be easily applied retroactively to existing HTML email templates would be great.

I am thinking along the lines of what we would use for the web like Eric Meyer's reset.css (http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/) or likewise. Of course we cannot import external CSS rules as we would a regular web page.

Answer

John picture John · Apr 16, 2013

The HTML Email Boilerplate is probably the closest thing you'll find. It's well commented and resets as much as is possible with html emails.

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