Lesson 4 of 7 · 6 min

Email HTML that survives Outlook

Understand what the generator outputs and get the email into your sending tool or test it in a real inbox.

Built for mail clients, not browsers

Email HTML and web HTML are two dialects of the same language, and code written for a browser falls apart in Outlook. The generator writes in the mail-client dialect from the first line.

That means presentation tables for layout, every style inline, and no style block for Outlook to strip out. Fonts are web-safe stacks, the body is capped at 600px, and the call to action is a table-cell button rather than a padded link, because padded links break in Outlook. Images carry alt text and explicit width and height.

One rule never bends: every email includes an unsubscribe link. In the raw HTML it shows up as a placeholder token, not a real URL. When you send through Email Studio, the system swaps that token for each recipient's own unsubscribe link at send time. If you send through your own tool, your tool handles the unsubscribe link instead.

Getting it out

The viewer gives you copy buttons for Subject, Preheader, HTML, and Plaintext. That is your path into Klaviyo, Mailchimp, HubSpot, or anything that accepts raw HTML: copy the HTML, paste it into a new campaign there. The plaintext version carries the same content as the HTML, so text-only recipients get a real email instead of a stripped one.

Test before you send

There is also an .eml download. Open it in Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail and look at the real thing before any send goes out. A browser preview is not an inbox, and the .eml is the cheapest way to catch a rendering problem while fixing it still costs nothing.

Reference

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