Please note: when you ask me to design and code your email template, I’ll take care of 99% of testing activities. However, the last 1% has to occur when you set up your actual campaign. Before sending it out to your subscribers, you need to make a quick test run (preferably including one desktop email client and one mobile email client).
My personal test setup*
I run a quite extensive test setup in order to make sure your email template renders properly across various devices and platforms. My personal test environment consists of actual devices only, so I don’t use any artificial virtual test simulator emulator thingies whatsoever.
This is the hardware and software I use for email template testing:
- Outlook 2016 on Windows 10
- Outlook 2013 on Windows 8
- Outlook 2010 on Windows Vista
- Outlook 2007 on Windows Vista
- Outlook.office365.com
- Windows Live Mail on Windows 10
- Thunderbird on Windows 10 and Linux (Mint)
- Apple Mail on iMac
- Gmail / Hotmail / Yahoo!
- Android Mail on Samsung Galaxy S2 and Samsung Galaxy S8 **
- Gmail app on Android and iOS
- iOS Mail on iPhone 5 and iPad 2 **
- Lots of web versions (Windows 10: Edge and Opera || Windows 8.1: Internet Explorer || OSX: Safari)
Other email clients and / or devices
Even though the list above is quite comprehensive, it’s not actually complete. There are other email clients and devices out there. Please note that – unless we’ve explicitly agreed to include other email clients in the test setup – I will ignore them, because their market share is just too small to consider.
* This list may change over time: email clients that are (not) supported today, may (not) be supported tomorrow.
** Android and iOS offer tons of email apps. Testing email templates in all of them is just crazy monkey business, so I only consider stock email apps.