CSS property · data last changed 10 Nov 2026
direction in email clients
Works in all 21.
caniemail (MIT) via @emailens/engine 0.18.22
No signup · Five clients free, Outlook Classic included · All 21 with an account
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direction is not among the 24 features we have screenshotted on real installs. The ones we have →
All 21 clients
| Client | Support |
|---|---|
| Gmail | Works |
| Gmail Android | Works |
| Gmail iOS | Works |
| Outlook 365 | Works |
| Outlook (New) | Works |
| Outlook Classic | Works |
| Outlook iOS | Works |
| Outlook Android | Works |
| Outlook for Mac | Works |
| Apple Mail | Works |
| Apple Mail iOS | Works |
| Yahoo Mail | Works |
| Yahoo Mail Android | Works |
| Yahoo Mail iOS | Works |
| Samsung Mail | Works |
| Thunderbird | Works |
| HEY Mail | Works |
| Proton Mail | Works |
| AOL Mail | Works |
| Fastmail | Works |
| Superhuman | Works |
How direction behaves
direction sets the base writing direction of text and is essential for right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew. Email clients honor direction at the document and element level, but bidirectional text mixing can cause client-specific rendering quirks, especially around punctuation.
- Outlook Classic handles direction at the <body> level reliably, but partial overrides on individual <td> cells can produce alignment glitches.
- Gmail respects direction but does not flip table-column order automatically, you must restructure HTML to match the reading order.
- Mixing direction with text-align: start / end is more reliable than literal left/right keywords.
Set direction on <html> or <body> rather than fighting it cell-by-cell. Use logical alignment values (start/end) and pair direction with explicit lang attributes to give clients the strongest signal for right-to-left rendering.
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