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I am supporting a system which sends an automatic populated email alert. I have rendered the page using a combination of CSS and html. The alert is sent from a system called Salesforce. My problem is, I have never owned a blackberry, and don't have access to one for testing purposes, but I know the alert looks like crap on it.
It seems to be reading the page as plain text, after rendering it and stripping all styles, tables etc. What considerations should I employ the increase the readibility of the alert on a blackberry.
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Most modern email clients send HTML emails by default. Gmail and Yahoo Mail, for example, have built-in WYSIWYG editors you can use to write HTML messages. However, if you want to write HTML in an external editor and then use it in your email client, it can be a little tricky.
The majority of email clients don't support every type of HTML content you see on the web. Web browsers are able to display scripts, animations, and complex navigation menus, while your typical email inbox isn't built to handle this type of content.
With HTML in your email, you can format the text, incorporate images, and do most of the same things in the email that you can do in a web page. As you can incorporate JavaScript into HTML in a web page, you can of course similarly incorporate JavaScript into HTML in an email.
To start with, in order to see HTML rendered e-mail on a BlackBerry simulator, no matter the model, the simulator must run off of a BES connection (corporate BlackBerry server), as the included ESS (the software POP/SMTP proxy app that allows you to test BlackBerry e-mail services locally), does not support HTML e-mail.
Alternatively, if you have no access to BES, you can still test HTML e-mail rendering with BIS (personal internet connection), but you would need to do so on a real device. You can build a program fairly quickly which listens to incoming e-mail on the device an then delivers the original source of the incoming e-mail to you for debugging.
That being said, the older models of BlackBerry (around RIM OS 4.1), do not support HTML e-mail. If they receive HTML e-mail, they will display the full HTML source code, tags and all.
As of RIM OS 4.5, HTML support has been implemented in the BlackBerry e-mail application. In these cases, if the device receives an HTML message, it will attempt to display the HTML rendered format, as best as it can.
If the device cannot render the HTML for whatever reason (such as if this is a simulator running with ESS), and the message is a MIME hybrid, where it contains both HTML and text-only parts in one message, the device will display the text-only version of the e-mail. If the e-mail message is HTML only, and doesn't contain a text-only equivalent in the same e-mail, the device will attempt to strip out the HTML bits and tags and such, and will attempt to present the HTML message as it's own text-only version.
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One testing option would be to run the BlackBerry emulators. Getting email on to them is quite tricky, but you can at least use the browser to test the rendering if you set the message up as a web page.
I'm not convinced by joshperry's comment that the rendering is the same across browser and email app, but then again the BlackBerry platform is such a nightmare to develop with I've been wrong about lots of things...
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