Template & Client Compatibility

[dm17]

I'm trying to find information on what makes Mosaico or MailChimp "more compatible with more email clients" - as I've seen many claims on this topic.

1. How do we know that the many email clients in the wild will display our mosaico/versafix-composed email as accurately as they display MailChimp-composed emails?

2. How can such a thing be known besides the amount of testing MailChimp must have done, considering its popularity?

3. What makes a template compatible with an SMTP relay? For example, if we compose with Mosaico and then send with Sparkpost or Sendgrid...

4. Are MailChimp and Mosaico templates cross compatible?

5. Considering the reporting features on Mosaico: how do the developers consider optimal integration with an SMTP relay, which does its own analytics and reporting?

Apologies, but this area is a bit opaque to me - and it seems this is true for many because of the lack of details in articles about newsletter compositing, WYSIWYG editors, and "compatible templates."

[bago]

A) Mosaico is template based, so compatibility depends on the template being used.
B) It is really unfair to think that Mailchimp compatibility is better just because they are big: just look in the internet to see WHO publish reports about email client issues and you won't see Mailchimp, there, but minor developers. E.g. the infamous 1px pixel bug from Outlook have been first reported by ME, even if it appeared for every sender, including Mailchimp ( https://mosaico.io/email-client-tricks/outlook-2016-weird-1px-horizontal-lines/ ). The most compatible technique to date, aka Fab4 ( https://mosaico.io/email-client-tricks/fab4-responsive-beyond-gmail/ ), have been shown by Rémi Parmentier aka HTeuMeuLeu, the author of "caniemail" ( https://www.caniemail.com/ ): no big email marketing service names like Mailchimp behind those stuff, because real innovation/evolution happens elsewhere.
C) I'd bet versafix-1, our master template, to show better compatibility than anything you will find around: of course everyone is good at most common clients, but you should check edge use cases, like gmail webmail from a smartphone (not the gmail app, but the gmail webapp through the mobile browser), or gmail app reading a non gmail email via IMAP (GANGA).

To answer your question:

1. I'd bet mosaico's "versafix-1" is more accurate (more compatible): do your own testing and report issues to the versafix-1 repo, if you find mailchimp is better: the more edge cases (e.g: country specific webmails/app) you'll test the more it will be clear.
2. wrong assumption.
3. this is a matter of what smtp relay service do: they should not break html, but if they do it is an issue in their service: we don't care of them: it is already a PITA to care of most email clients. If your smtp relay service changes your html when sending, simply switch to another service.
4. I don't know what you mean by this question.
5. "reporting features"? Which reporting features? Mosaico is just an email composer.

[bago]

Usually people already have a way to send emails and just need a modern email composer.

We (mosaico authors) are an italian ESP (https://www.voxmail.it/) and we have our own email servers.
CiviCRM (https://civicrm.org/) let their users to use mosaico, and I guess they use internal services by CiviCRM to send email via SMTP.
Mailtrain (https://github.com/Mailtrain-org/mailtrain) embeds mosaico and then use their own smtp services;
Lepatron (https://www.lepatron.email/) uses mosaico and exports the results to third party services (they also publish a github repo for ESP issues with html: https://github.com/Badsender-com/esp-html-bugs ) ;
Being free&opensource we don't know most of our users.

Sending massive emails is not something we care in mosaico: there are plenty of services or opensource tools to send emails. We care about building emails: it is a very specific goal. We don't even provide the backend needed by mosaico to deal with image upload/processing because of this.

[dm17]

Looks like I'll be exploring if Mosaico can be run in an iframe for our purposes. If not, then we'll just open a new window for it.
If possible, then I'd also like to get your comments on the email composing aspects of Ghost as compared to Mosaico:
https://ghost.org/help/email-newsletters/

[bago]

I can't answer, I never tried ghost email composer, but AGAIN, what makes Mosaico unique is it being "template based", so you can probably create a template for mosaico that let you create the same output you get from ghost email composer, but you can't customize how ghost email composer creates its own email.

From the page you linked seems like their composer is very light and let you create very simple single column newsletters.

[dm17]

Thanks - this gives me a better feel for where this can fit in the overall system. The standard way to embed videos with Mosaico is to link to the image (video thumbnail) and self-host it? I was hoping there's a more elegant way of doing this for our next emailing flow.

[bago]

Mosaico doesn't care/deal with this. versafix-1 template doesn't give you a "video block". You can easily create a template that will embed hosted videos, if you know how to do that and you are happy with email client support of your solution.

Most email clients do not support video in email so most senders simply send an image and link that image to an online video (youtube, vimoe or whatever you like). Some email builder automagically create an "image block" starting from a youtube video url (extract an image thumbnail of the video and simply put an image with a link to the video): mosaico does not provide this facility.

https://www.caniemail.com/features/html-video/