Using minified HTML in email development

Question

What (if any) pitfalls would I encounter If I wanted to use minified HTML code for deployment as an email?

Wouldn't the use of minified code ensure proper rendering accross the majority of different clients given I took the necessary precautions in targeting the clients I intend to support?

More specifically, trying to remedy issues like closures and white spacing in some versions of Outlook, etc. I live by properly formatted code, so hacking the beauty that is nicely formatted code seems like overkill if I could just minify it, deploy it, and call it a day..

Answer 1

This will cause issues in various email clients.

In my experience, different webmail clients (Yahoo and Gmail in particular) will have issues with lines over a certain length (a couple hundred characters) and start behaving oddly - missing parts of the content, substituting in random characters, etc.

If this were to happen in the middle of HTML, it could be disastrous.

There is no good reason to minify HTML in an email - all of the issues with things like whitespace are well documented by people all over the internet and fixes are easily available.