Resources for Creating, Testing, and Sending HTML Emails

Articles, Information, & Organizations

SitePoint: How to Code HTML Emails

SitePoint: The Principles of Beautiful HTML Email

Think Vitamin: Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered

Think Vitamin: HTML Emails – Taming the Beast

CSS-Tricks: Using CSS in HTML Emails: The Real Story

Email Standards Project

Nielsan Norman Group: Email Newsletter Usability
544 page PDF Report the subject. Probably chock-full of good stuff but it’s $400 bucks (or $700 if you wanna make a copy)

Campaign Monitor: A Guide to Using CSS in HTML Emails

Wikipedia: CAN-SPAM (Set of laws passed in 2003 that govern some specifics about mass emails)

Mayhem Studios: HTML Newsletters on a Mac

Smashing Magazine: Best Practices for Bulletproof Email Delivery

Free Templates

Mail Chimp: Free HTML Email Templates

Campaign Monitor: 30 Free HTML Email Templates

Spark List: Free HTML Newsletter Templates for Email Marketing

Screencast Tutorial

CSS-Tricks: Creating and Sending HTML Emails
Step-by-step walkthrough of how to create an HTML email that will look good and have a very high chance of looking correct in all email clients. Tables and inline styling!

Arguments Against HTML Email

George Dillon: 7 Reasons Why HTML Email is a Bad Thing
Not everybody things HTML emails are so hot.

HTML Email Isn’t Rich

Testing Your Designs

Premailer: Preflight for HTML Email

Litmus: Email Testing

Campaign Monitor: How to test HTML emails

Mail Chimp: Stupid HTML Email Design Mistakes

Contactology: Test your Email’s Spam Score

Email Reach

Services

Mail Chimp
Mail Chimp is the only one on this list I have directly used and I can vouch for them 100%. Reasonable prices, awesome user interface, and loaded with the features you’ll want.

Constant Contact

Campaign Monitor

Cake Mail
Cake Mail’s tagline is “White Label Email Marketing” meaning that with their service, you can sort of “brand” the backend of the software. You are able to create and send campaigns like all the other services, but you can also set up clients to be able to do it themselves and in essence become a reseller.

Plick