If you code a lot of HTML emails, sooner or later you run into nagging little Lotus Notes rendering issues (usually it’s a corporate user with a very old installation). They can be painful, but since so many companies use Notes, you have to design for it. Actually, I kind of like Notes, because it leads to more sales of our inbox inspection tool </ evil>

Well, we just learned from the ZDnet blog that IBM plans to put Lotus Notes in the cloud with LotusLive iNotes. According to the article, IBM appears to be positioning it against Google Apps as “web-based email for the enterprise.” Sounds like yet another email app you’ll have to learn how to design around, but this could be a good thing for email marketers.  Browser-based email programs generally render HTML emails nicely (um, because browsers are built for rendering HTML?) but they do have little idiosyncrasies, like spotty CSS support (we discuss this in point #6 in our How to Design HTML Email guide). We’ll post any special coding considerations we find for LotusLive iNotes here on our blog, so stay tuned.