BBIS is defeating our efforts to create engaging emails with responsive design by stripping table cell 'background' parameters.

I've had our email newsletter designed by the Email Monks, who are very good at producing emails that work in all email clients. The task was made difficult by BBIS not allowing the email DOCTYPE to be specified or the HTML, HEAD and BODY tags to be edited. But impressively, they managed to do it anyway.

However in the end I’m being defeated by one additional BBIS quirk – the editor strips the ‘background’ parameter from table cells. This means that designs which rely on such images fail in Lotus Notes and in Microsoft’s outlook.com web email client because they don't respect the CSS background-image property, either inline or in a STYLE block, so need to have 'background' as a fallback. This apparently affects about 5% of email recipients, but will probably grow with the roll-out of Office 365.

Some of the most engaging email designs heavily rely on background images because they allow html text and other content in HTML email to be floated over images. So this is very unfortunate.

Please fix this. It’s presumably a setting in the BBIS email editor and should be relatively easy to solve.

Effective communication is reliant on innovative email design, so it's unfortunate to have our efforts defeated by the system through which we must send our emails.

Thank you