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Regardless of how strong your love of trees or dislike of printers is, every now and then there's a worthy reason for either for you or your subscribers to print an email. Sadly though, simply hitting 'print' in your email client of choice doesn't usually bring the best results. If your email contains large images, it can also cost you in toner and paper, as well.

So, you're probably thinking, 'Well, this is obvious. I use print stylesheets on the web, so why not for email?'. Not so fast, buster. As we go through some of the options available when it comes to building printer-friendly email, you'll come to realize that printing from your inbox can certainly be a fickle beast.

Why shouldn't I use print stylesheets?

Print stylesheets and email are simply not great friends. Or at best, they're the kind of friends who routinely show each other up on dates and never shout a round of drinks.

A few years ago, we did an experiment on whether or not @media screen { ... } works in HTML email. Consequently, we tested <style type="text/css" media="print"> and found that although stylesheet acceptance may differ between email clients, both methods share a similar story. After a series of tests with a print-optimized email design, here's a sample of our results:

Email support for print stylesheets
Email client	@media print { ... }	media="print"
Apple Mail 4
Outlook Express/2003
Outlook 2007/2010
Thunderbird
Yahoo! Mail
Gmail
Windows Live Hotmail

In addition, linking to an external print stylesheet poses its own set of issues. As some email clients tend to strip out <link> tags, Campaign Monitor imports any external stylesheets into the HTML code. This is sound logic, however it often results in styles for the screen being overridden.

So as you can see, things aren't looking too good for the print stylesheet. What's worse, in our tests with web email clients in particular, we had our email designs either degrade in the inbox (Yahoo!), or display our print styles instead (I'm looking at you, Hotmail).

The bottom line: Use print stylesheets with extreme caution. And only if you know exactly which email clients your recipients are using.

How about my web version?

A better option is to link to the web version of your email and prompt your subscribers to print from their web browser instead. This ensures greater consistency with your email design, however doesn't solve the problem of unnecessarily printing large images and running up a toner bill. On the upside, it simply works.

Another option is to link to a PDF version of your email. This also means that you can make design tweaks such as scaling/removing large images and provide a more print-friendly look overall. On the downside, this requires a little more overhead on top of designing your email newsletter and can result in fairly large PDF file sizes (which not everyone may appreciate downloading).

So, what's an email to do?

As you can see, there's no silver bullet when it comes to making your email printer-friendly. However, if you or your client is determined to make your email look great in both the inbox and from the printer, here are some pointers to consider:

• Cut down on the huge images. They can chew up a lot of paper, ink and printing time (as well as making your email slow to load).
• Anything that's text, display as text. Images used for headings, quotes etc can look pretty natty once printed.
• Anticipate a degree of layout-breakage. Keep your layout simple and avoid loads of floated divs, elements that are likely to wrap beneath each other (and look bad in the process) and non-static positioning (eg. position: absolute;). Also think about how your navigation will look - if you have a table of contents, how will this display on paper?
• Keep your email width at 600px or less. Otherwise there's a good chance that it will chew through extra pages when printing anything that exceeds the margins of a printed page.
• Test, test, test. Have a look at the print previews at least across a number of email clients. But you knew that :)

If there's a moral to this story, it's not a unique one - HTML simply wasn't designed to translate beautifully from the screen to print. I highly recommend that you read this excellent resource on print stylesheets, as it not only details the challenges faced by folks designing for the web and the printer, but gives you a feel for how this issue compounds when paired with the well-quirky world of email design.

Finally, it's over to you. What are your tips for creating printer-friendly campaigns? Let us know in the comments below.

Do you manage your business across multiple web apps? Wish they could all talk together? Just as the Babel fish from 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' served as a universal language translator between alien races, OneSaas is an online service for transferring contacts and financial data between multiple web apps. That's right, by acting as a bridge between APIs, it can push new and existing contacts from say, Highrise and Google Contacts, to a Campaign Monitor subscriber list. And you don't even have to stick it in your ear to use it.

Which web apps can you sync with OneSaas?

It's not uncommon for folks to have customer details scattered across multiple web apps. For instance, you might have paying customers in Highrise that you want to invoice in Freshbooks. Additionally, you want to add these same customers to a Campaign Monitor subscriber list, so you can send them post-purchase email newsletters and updates. Exporting and re-importing new and existing contacts/subscribers across two or more services can be a real chore, so OneSaas has done the legwork for you.

With OneSaas, you can automatically push new and existing contacts from one or more of the following apps to a Campaign Monitor subscriber list:

• Basecamp
• Business Catalyst
• Freshbooks
• Google Contacts
• Highrise
• Saasu
• EventBrite (Coming soon!)
• SalesForce (Coming soon!)
• WordPress (Coming soon!)

In addition, OneSaas' Financial Management accounts can be used to migrate and synchronize orders and transactions between apps like Business Catalyst, FreshBooks, OneSaas, and Saasu. We'll focus simply on managing your contacts for now.

Getting started

Setting up OneSaas to push contacts from the web app of your choice to a Campaign Monitor subscriber list is fairly simple. And don't worry, it's all documented within OneSaas itself. In this example, we'll race through getting an existing 37signals' Highrise account to integrate with Campaign Monitor, so buckle up.

Say you have an existing Highrise account and list of contacts:

The first thing you'll need is your Highrise account's API token. Now, lets say you already have a OneSaas account. In the 'My Cloud' tab, create a 'new connection' by selecting 'Highrise HQ' and adding your API token and domain name when prompted:

So far, so good. Now, lets do the same for Campaign Monitor. There's no need to get your API key in advance - OneSaas displays your Campaign Monitor account page in the app, so you can get your key on the fly. You'll also be given the option to select which Campaign Monitor subscriber list you want to push new Highrise contacts to.

If everything has gone to plan, your 'My Cloud' tab in OneSaas should look like this:

All up, this process takes no more than 5-10 minutes and only needs to be done once.

Pushing contacts to a subscriber list

The neat thing about One Saas is that you can set-and-forget. Either you can wait for OneSaas to push new contacts to your Campaign Monitor subscriber list on an hourly/daily basis (depending on your plan), or you can click 'Synchronize' under 'Active connections' to manually push your Highrise contacts to Campaign Monitor. You probably want to do this on your first run.

And well, the bottom line is that it simply works. After clicking 'Synchronize', our Highrise contacts were automatically added to our Campaign Monitor subscriber list of choice:

Note that at this point, it's possible to transfer names and email addresses via OneSaas, but not custom fields. We'll put this one on our wish list to the developer.

Our verdict

The skinny is that OneSaas does as labelled on the tin. It's also fairly easy to setup, thanks to a fair amount of in-app documentation. Plus this setup process only needs to be performed once for as long as your account details remain the same, as OneSaas will push contacts indefinitely until told to do otherwise.

OneSaas has a range of simple pricing plans, based on the number of contacts you wish to synchronize, how often you want synchronization to happen and the number of applications you want to connect. There's even a free plan to help you kick the tyres at absolutely no cost. Included is in-app email support, as well as support channels via Skype and Twitter (@OneSaas).

Perhaps most endearingly, OneSaas are Australian-made. And as we know, all the best web apps find their roots in the surf and sun Down Under!

On the downside, it's only possible to synchronize your contacts with one Campaign Monitor subscriber list. Also, the transfer of custom fields is not yet supported, so you can't segment your single subscriber list by whatever contact details you have stored in Highrise, or elsewhere. OneSaas plan to support custom fields sometime in the future, but if multiple list or custom field support is something you're specifically after, please feel free to let us and the developers know in the comments.

We've been in touch with the friendly folks at OneSaas for a few months now, so its been great to watch this service move out of beta and onto the public stage. Now it's in the wild, it seems that they're not planning to rest on their laurels any time soon. Alongside further improvements to their service, integrations with WordPress, SalesForce and EventBrite also in the works.

So, if you're after an automated way to push your contacts from apps like Freshbooks and Highrise to a Campaign Monitor list, then give OneSaas a go. It's a simple, affordable solution to what has long been a tricky problem... And you don't have to like fish to use it.