Personally; I'd prefer to recieve plain text email.

The biggest problem you're likely to hit with email + CSS is linking... for the same reason pictures from remote locations don't load by default; linked CSS ( i.e. link href="" ) isn't going to load by default. There's a risk of someone operating spam emails that invoke cross site scripting attacks (webmail only) even attempt distributed denial of service attacks ( webmail or email applications ) if remote resources are requested upon opening an email.

The only other problem you might run into would be if email clients used their own stripped down parser/renderers; and if those renderers didn't implement CSS fully. For the reason I've already mentioned; CSS shouldn't be implemented fully in email clients; because there are CSS properties that can invoke downloads from remote locations ( background-image for example ).

Ideally though; an email client shouldn't block all CSS to prevent such occurances; it should block whatever module it is that fulfils remote downloads.

How exactly are you using CSS?




The only other problem you might hit is rendering differences in email applications, if they use OS specific controls; those'll likely be the system's lowest common denominator (i.e. My old MS Outlook will use the same HTML rendering component as MSIE5; regardless of the fact Opera is my default browser ).

These pages might help; they are more related to HTML email in webmail clients. Still; CSS is more likely to be actively stripped out of webmail views as apposed to just being ignored, so perhaps they'll help you somewhat..

http://alistapart.com/articles/cssemail

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/...ing_css_1.html

Well I've definitely decided against using CSS, so I'm not using it at all. Before that, I was using linked CSS. But thanks for the info on the HTML. I"ll look into that.

Why not add an option to the form so the user can select HTML or Plain Text?

Good idea. Clean, easy. Just a little check box in the form. Nice. I'll have to give that a try.
Thanks.

The norm for HTML email is to use embedded style attributes in each tag.

Too often the recipient of your email may not have control over his computer, because he is part of a business or university network that is controlled by systems administrators.

One idea is to send a plain text email, and provide a link in it to a formatted website.

Quite a lot of websites (forums etc...) offer the user the choice of either HTML or PlainText. I suppose it wouldnt be that hard to set up.

No, not hard at all, I may do that actually. However, I really think that this form is going to be filled out so little, and some will not even supply an email address anyway, as it is optional, so I may just leave it as is. If it were going to a wider group of people, I would change it.

However, this discussion has been very educational and useful, as I do have a couple other sites with emails that will go out far more regularly, so plain text may be the way to go there.

I came across this post about CSS in email - it may be of some use.

Make sure you encode it as a multipart-mime though because some email clients don't like HTML