Thanks for your reply.

Perhaps this is simply a case of my dyslexia working backwards, but I meant to point out each step do illustrate newsletter “don’ts” that would otherwise be website “dos.” Each step does improve upon the step before, so–yes–the bottom line is: use inline styles

To answer your question—while most e-mail clients will ignore your DOCTYPE declaration, outright, some (like Novell GroupWise) do keep them, and others (like Outlook 2003) are based on a web browser’s codebase (Internet Explorer), so: yes, it’s always better to declare it; and, especially if you have your e-newsletters archived on the web.

(The real issue of DOCTYPE declaration comes into play with web-based e-mail client, who need to maintain their own doctypes.)

However, the article is structured in a way that makes the content confusing. Usually in articles like “x number of tips” — each tip is valid on its own and the more tips the user could follow, the better.

In this article, tips 1, 4, and 6 are independent tips, each one can be implemented. Tip 5 is some extra detail about tip 4.

And here is the most confusing part: tips 3 and 2 are back-up recommendations of what to do if you can’t follow the advice in tip 4:

Tip 4 is the ideal, use inline styles. But if you can’t do that, then follow tip 3: put your style sheet in the body instead of in the head. If you can’t do that, then follow tip 2: put the style sheet in the head as opposed to linking to an external file.

Now my question. Do you recommend putting in a DocType declaration?

Again, thanks so much. I hope you take my criticisms in the constructive nature in which I meant them.