So, your goal is to look professional. Ideally your email communications will look good regardless of where or how the message is received. This is where Litmus App comes in.

Litmus App is not an email broadcast or distribution tool. The program does three things:

1. It lets you preview what your email newsletter will look like in over 40 email clients before it is sent.
2. It lets you check to see how a particular webpage will look in several browsers, including upcoming beta versions of popular browsers.
3. If you purchase a Plus account or higher, you can add tracking code that will measure certain user interactions with your broadcasts.

It's important to note that Litmus App is not email broadcast program.

Litmus App's Email and Webpage Emulators

New! Our video tour takes you behind the scenes and shows you how the program works! [watch the video]

In testing the program, we found it to be nicely designed and easy to use. Here are the positive and negative things we noted during our review.

The good:

• You get to select what email clients to check and can save your list as a default list, so it is easy to pull up for future tests.
• Results are easy to browse and it is easy to spot problems by glancing at the thumbnail preview as they load on the screen.
• You can browse through the results and mark individual clients to show whether your email looks correct (or not).
• The spam filters tell you if your selected newsletter has passed or failed common spam filters, to help you prevent having your newsletter deleted as spam.
• Finally, you can also see the raw source sent to different email clients, which is sometimes tricky to retreive.

The bad:

• In our first run, some of the thumbnails just said "there was a problem" capturing the screenshot, but it didn't say why. It looked like the problem might have related to the screenshot capture process, but there was no obvious way to recapture an individual screenshot.
• While the program helps you pinpoint which email clients will not display your newsletter as you would like, it is up to you to debug the problem. For example, at first our newsletter was showing up as raw HTML in the Blackberry Curve screenshot. It was useful to know about the problem, but it would have been nice if there had been suggestions for how to fix the problem. (Even just having some tips to help address common problems would have been useful!)
• Similarly, when a newsletter failed a spam test you could see the failing score, but there was very little information about why the newsletter had failed the test. This made it difficult to know what to change to have the newsletter pass tests it had failed.
• When running tests, the system usually estimated that it would take five to six minutes to run a test, but would then require considerably more time (often 30 minutes or more) when all of the email clients were selected.

Accounts with the Analytics Upgrade

Litmus Apps also lets you track and analyze mailing lists if you upgrade to a Plus account or higher.

Like the email and webpage emulators, the analytics tool is easy to use. The system lets you generate a tracking code that you add to your email and then will record the number of times the newsletter is opened, forwarded as well as information on how long it is kept open and also what email clients it was opened in.

We found this information less useful than the email and webpage emulators.

In our tests we found some inconsistencies. In several tests we forwarded the newsletter to another person, but in every case this was not detected by the program, even though we opened the forwarded newsletter in at least two instances.

Also, if you want to know which content generates the most user interest, you would need to use another tracking program to find out what people click on. For the price, the Analytics module seems best suited to marketing agencies who can use the information to get an indication of the level of engagement (measured by how long the email is left open) and also to find out what email clients are being used by recipients.

Video tour

Since Litmus App does not offer a free trial, you might find it hard decide whether or not you need this app. To help we've created a short video tour to show you how the program works. [click play on the video above to watch the video]

Conclusion

There is no question that Litmus App offers an easy to use program with a useful purpose.

There are lower cost email emulators, but none of the ones we have found will check as many email clients as Litmus App. There are also free webpage emulators. But even on that account Litmus App promises to save you time, as it runs all the tests for you at once.

In the end, you will need to decide whether the cost is worth the time savings and professionalism you will gain when your emails are sent.