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HTML e-mails are a complex beast. Deciding what to send (as the sender) and what to display (as the recipient) is tricky and potentially dangerous.
On the recipient side of things, we have webmail and we have regular e-mail clients. For my purposes, I consider 'webmail' anything that displays the HTML e-mail as part of something that in itself is HTML, and regular e-mail clients anything that displays the HTML e-mail in a different context (e.g. OS- and program-specific GUI).
What should webmail do with HTML headers (<head>, <title>, <meta>, ...) in an e-mail?
Is there a spec somewhere, be that as an actual standard or de-facto-standard?
My motivation for asking is that we use HTML Purifier to sanitise our HTML and if its Core.CollectErrors feature reports changes, they're reported. This 'reported' is both necessary... and frustrating. We strip out some of the reported errors as insignificant for our purposes, but HTML headers mark a massive hurdle:
Someone could potentially use <link> in their e-mail, which we would strip out. (HTML Purifier is intended for HTML fragments, not full documents)
The desire to use things like <link> in HTML e-mails certainly seems to exist, and there are plenty of e-mail clients that send <meta>-tags in an HTML header (e.g. Outlook), but how are things handled in the wild? Is it safe to strip them out silently (which for our purposes denotes a 'non-breaking change') and lay proverbial blame on the sending party if it does break? Is that reasonable? Has someone ever decided this in the one or other way? My google-fu is weak. :(
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I seriously doubt there is a spec anywhere which specifies how HTML emails should be embedded into webmail clients. It's mostly a question of achieving parity with existing webmail providers which provide the ability to view HTML email. I suspect stylesheets are a notable exception, but I also suspect most HTML mailers that support that heavy styling are fairly constrained in what they can and cannot do, given how webmail things may handle them. I'd suggest doing some experiments, and consulting the source code of open-source webmail systems like SquirrelMail.
If you are worried about information loss, one thing that many clients allow you to do is download the original HTML, for offline viewing. Of course, it tends to be pretty atrocious, so I don't know why anyone would do that.
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You should look at:
http://htmlemailboilerplate.com/
You will find a boilerplate code for HTML emails. There is also a good practice slideshow.
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