You take care to send email messages that are grammatically correct and well formatted. But did you know that what you send isn’t always what your recipient sees? In some cases, what you send can deliver a different impression than you intended.

GMail

Here’s a message I wrote up in my Gmail account and sent to myself (to three of my other email addresses).  The photo I attached is of my collie, the smiling Archee McLeash.

Yahoo!

My GMail-generated email landed in my Yahoo! email account with the photo up top. The whole email looked like this:

Hotmail

In Hotmail, the photo was back at the bottom, but large (I cropped the message here, to save some space).

Microsoft Outlook

Wow!  Outlook made some big changes. The text was sent in Arial, but shows up in Times New Roman. Microsoft-provided text is appended to the bottom. And the photo isn’t displayed; it’s only attached as a link. My recipient would need to click on it to open it up.

What do you want them to see?

None of these email services are doing anything wrong, nor is one “better” than another. My message appeared correctly everywhere I sent it: Correctly, but with differences.

• Font change. If you send emails using a certain font as part of your brand or image, your reader might not see that font. Font appearances are often governed by system defaults or by preferences the user sets up.
• Photos. If you use an email signature that includes your photo, your reader might not receive it as part of the email message. It might come as an unopened attachment.
• Colors, bold, italics: I didn’t add such variations to my test emails. Would they make a difference? I don’t know, but that’s the point.

Send email to yourself, or to a friend or colleague who will report back to you (offer to return the favor), so you can be sure to structure email messages that look good wherever they travel.