HTML Email Template Generator
Generate responsive HTML email templates with inline CSS. Choose from Newsletter, Transactional, Promotional, or Welcome email layouts.
About the HTML Email Template Generator
HTML emails require a different approach from modern web development — email clients like Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail strip CSS from <style> tags, requiring all styling to be inline. They also have inconsistent support for modern CSS, so table-based layouts remain the most reliable approach. This generator creates email-safe HTML using inline styles, <table> layouts, and a 600px max-width — the industry standard for email client compatibility. Choose from four template types: Newsletter for content updates, Transactional for receipts and notifications, Promotional for marketing, and Welcome for onboarding sequences.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Producing a responsive email layout without hand-writing nested tables.
- Getting a starting template for a transactional or a newsletter send.
- Producing inline-styled markup that survives mail clients stripping stylesheets.
- Generating a layout you then populate from a template engine.
- Replacing a template that breaks in one particular client.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Why do HTML emails still use tables?
- Because Outlook on Windows renders mail with Microsoft Word's HTML engine, which has no meaningful support for float, flexbox or grid. Tables are the only layout primitive every client agrees on, which is why email markup looks two decades out of date and correctly so.
- Why must CSS be inlined?
- Because Gmail strips `<style>` blocks in several contexts, including the mobile apps and any forwarded message. A `style` attribute on the element survives. Authoring in a stylesheet and inlining at build time is the standard workflow — hand-inlining is what email tooling exists to avoid.
- What width should the template be?
- 600 pixels, by long convention — it fits the Outlook reading pane without a horizontal scrollbar and scales down acceptably on phones. Anything wider is cropped in the preview pane, which is where a large share of recipients decide whether to keep reading.
- Which CSS can I actually rely on?
- Very little beyond colour, font, padding on table cells, and width. Background images fail in Outlook without VML, `position` is unsupported, and media queries are ignored by several clients. `caniemail.com` is the reference, and the safe answer is usually a simpler layout rather than a fallback.
- Is a plain-text alternative still worth including?
- Yes. Spam filters treat an HTML-only message as a weak signal, some clients and watches render text only, and accessibility tooling reads it more reliably. It is a second body part in the same message, not a second send.
Common errors and gotchas
- Relying on modern CSS, since many clients support only tables and inline styles.
- Testing in one client, where rendering differs enormously between them.
- Omitting a plain-text alternative part, which hurts deliverability and accessibility.
- Using an image for the main message, which vanishes when images are blocked by default.
- Forgetting a preheader, which leaves the client to pick the first text it finds.