Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail are browser-based email! They will strip out things like BODY, DOCTYPE, and HEAD tags. We make sure we don't encounter this problem by using inline CSS.

The smaller you can make your image files, the better. You certainly don't want to make the images grainy, but large image files increase email load time, and that impacts the success of your campaigns.

In plain-text emails, the URL appears in parentheses ... and if your URL is long, that can start to look pretty unwieldy, particularly if you're including a lot of URLs in your email.

Including these three elements in your email template will help ensure you're always CAN-SPAM compliant. Because including these three components is ... well, the law.

That means any images in your email templates should be hosted on your website. Then, make the image path point to the URL of the page on which the image is hosted. It should end with a file extension like .jpg or .gif, not .com.

We all know not everyone renders their emails in HTM. Some people, in fact, can't do it at all depending on their email client or the device they're reading it on. That's where plain text comes in handy.