Styling HTML email for Gmail

The answers here are outdated, as of today Sep 30 2016. Gmail is currently rolling out support for the style tag in the head, as well as media queries. If Gmail is your only concern, you're safe to use classes like a modern developer!

For reference, you can check the official gmail CSS docs.

As a side note, Gmail was the only major client that didn't support style (reference, until they update anyway). That means you can almost safely stop putting styles inline. Some of the more obscure clients may still need them.


Use inline styles for everything. This site will convert your classes to inline styles: http://premailer.dialect.ca/


I agree with everyone who supports classes AND inline styles. You might have learned this by now, but if there is a single mistake in your style sheet, Gmail will disregard it.

You might think that your CSS is perfect, because you've done it so often, why would I have mistakes in my CSS? Run it through the CSS Validator (for example http://www.css-validator.org/) and see what happens. I did that after encountering some Gmail display issues, and to my surprise, several Microsoft Outlook specific style declarations showed up as mistakes.

Which made sense to me, so I removed them from the style sheet and put them into a only for Microsoft code block, like so:

<!--[if mso]>
<style type="text/css">
body, table, td, .mobile-text {
font-family: Arial, sans-serif !important;
}
</style>
<xml>
  <o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
    <o:AllowPNG/>
    <o:PixelsPerInch>96</o:PixelsPerInch>
  </o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml>
<![endif]-->

This is just a simple example, but, who know, it might come in handy some time.


Gmail started basic support for style tags in the head area. Found nothing official yet but you can easily try it yourself.
It seems to ignore class and id selectors but basic element selectors work.

<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head>
    <style type="text/css">
      p{font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:12px;margin:0}  
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Email content here</p>
  </body>
</html>

it will create a style tag in its own head area limited to the div containing the mail body

<style>div.m14623dcb877eef15 p{font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:12px;margin:0}</style>

Tags:

Html

Css

Gmail

Html Email

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