I have had some badly rendered emails appear in my inbox in the past. Regardless of the email client; Outlook, Thunderbird, Hotmail, Gmail and more. Companies like Campaign Monitor & the Email Standards Project should be utterly applauded for their efforts to try and standardise emails in a similar way to web browsers.

However, nothing, and I mean nothing can excuse mistakes like this. Morrisons are a huge UK supermarket and have a 7-figure online budget. They use multiple online agencies to manage their web presence. Presumably (and a little through experience on this one) Morrisons use an agency to send their email marketing. OK so it is wishful thinking for me to imagine they would test in every email client and ensure a readable mail for all the big ones, but you would hope that the email contained something legible.

A few bits of text?

A link to the online version?

Please?

Check out what I got:

morrisons broken email 1

morrisons broken email 2

Pretty nuts right? How many people got the email like this? Everyone? Just Gmail? Should Morrisons have sent a follow-up? Do they even know?

Email marketing software is very sophisticated in 2008 and there is no excuse for any company to do this. Unsubscribe now methinks.

If you are really brave, check out just how long this scrawbled code jumble email actually was (and this was clipped by Gmail!):

The crazy Morrisons broken email full size (image)