email

A mail layout that reflows with no media query at all: percentage widths held in by max-width, with fixed-width ghost tables that only Outlook can see.

Laying a page out in nested tables because the renderer has no box model worth trusting, which is how mail is still built and how the web was built before CSS.

A mail button built to survive a renderer that drops CSS: the fill carried by a cell or box behind the link rather than by a background the client can refuse.

Designing a mail for clients that will invert its palette without asking, where a near-black behaves better than black and a logo needs a ground it survives on.

Asking a new subscriber to confirm from the address they typed, so a list holds only addresses whose owner agreed and a typo never becomes a stranger's mail.

Asking for access to a contact list under one pretext and using it to send invitations that appear to come from the reader.

Signing in by clicking a single-use link emailed on request, with no password, and a screen that waits and offers to resend while the mail arrives.

Collecting many similar alerts into one summary rather than delivering each, so the count rises but the number of interruptions does not.

Signing in by typing a short code sent to a second channel, keeping the reader inside the app rather than sending them out to a mail client.

The line an inbox prints under a subject, written as hidden text at the top of the mail so the client shows those words instead of scraping whatever body copy comes first.

The name a mail appears to come from, chosen rather than inherited, because a reader scanning an inbox decides on it before reading a word of the subject.

Alt text given size, colour and weight so a mail whose images are blocked still reads as something designed instead of as a column of grey stubs.

The one line a mail is opened or ignored on, written to survive a list that truncates it and shows it wedged between the sender and the preview text.

Mail sent because one person did one thing, a receipt or a reset, which is why it may carry no marketing and why its design is a record rather than a pitch.

The way out of a mailing list, which the law and the mail clients now both insist is one click, and whose difficulty is the honest measure of a sender.