CSS and e-Newsletters

We recently had some lovely e-Newsletter templates developed for us for our newest mailing lists. Imagine our dismay, then, to learn that Gmail strips CSS from incoming emails, rendering templates near useless.

But how much does this matter? Well… that’s what we’d like to find out. It feels like more and more people are subscribing to professional e-Newsletters with personal addresses rather than work addresses, to avoid having to unsubscribe and resubscribe between jobs. I know of several people who have created secondary personal email accounts just for subscriptions.

Our email client in the office reads the templates just fine. But we don’t know about other office-environment email clients, or how many readers are using personal accounts. Are our readers seeing what we see? Is it worth developing specific templates for our e-Newsletters, especially in the wake of the upcoming redesign?

How do you subscribe to e-Newsletters? What client do you use to read them? Do you think they look good, or that something’s missing?