.Mac webmail interface screws CSS, email marketers
An email marketer tested 
the new .Mac webmail interface and didn’t like what he found. His “marketing emails” are screwed by the way in which the new web interface handles CSS.
The old interface did a good job, he remembers. It “had amazing support for CSS and standards-based markup”.
But the new client wraps the whole email in a new DIV container:
This process is obviously aimed at foiling any modifications to the .Mac GUI caused by the use of type selectors. And if properly executed it would not impact the appearance of the source email. However, .Mac adds a gratuitous DIV just inside the new #messageCanvas DIV, consequently rendering all CSS useless…
As a result, direct marketers are faced with a dilemma:
So the result is that we’re at an impasse with .Mac: either we support other clients or we support .Mac. The former is the obvious choice, leaving us with .Mac emails looking like those rendered in Gmail and Hotmail. Bummer.
Or not.
(Hawk-eyed readers will notice that a coding work-around for this is presented in the comments to the original post.)
Tags: css, direct marketing, dotmac, interface, mac, standards, webmailRelated posts
December 7th, 2006 at 12:34 am
Who gives a shit about some spammer?
December 7th, 2006 at 12:36 am
You don’t think that uncovering a change in the way .Mac’swebmail handles CSS is interesting and newsworthy in its own right, quite apart from who discovers it?
December 7th, 2006 at 6:09 am
No, I don’t.
December 7th, 2006 at 9:08 am
This is the best news I’ve heard in a while. I consider it a feature, not a bug.
December 7th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Exactly my initial thought! :)
December 7th, 2006 at 11:40 am
Another good reason to use the .mac web mail client. :)
Thanks Apple.
December 7th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
It has nothing to do with spamming or marketing; just that .Mac re-renders crap, and that’s a A Bad Thingâ„¢.
It’s Apple’s re-rendering of CSS that’s a problem.
Forest. Trees.
April 11th, 2007 at 4:27 am
Co-sign what jack said.
Business reasons aside, outside of preventing XSS exploits (which is solely margin/position tagging), there’s NO reason to mangle CSS as badly as .Mac has done.
Responsible mailers sending multipart-alternative messages anyway, so if you don’t like HTML, your MUA will pick up the text version. Everyone wins.
Interesting update as of this writing (4/10/07):
Gratuitous div is gone, for all intents and purposes. However, the customer wrapper div (id’d with a “messageCanvas” generated value), has a STYLE tag as a subelement. This style defines an id selector which does not match anything in the document. Most browsers behave, and ignore this: Internet Explorer doesn’t (big surprise?). Suggested fix is to apply a wrapper div, or inline line-height/font-size definitions on all text-based elements.
Mangling fonts does not prevent XSS exploits, and it’s asinine to interfere. Another disappointment from Cupertino.