The new Icebreaker email was hard to miss in my Inbox, and not just because of their latest mankind-meets-merino ultra surreal image.

Most html (image) emails are designed 600-700 pixels (21 - 25cm) wide, so subscribers can see the key elements of the email in their preview pane, regardless of their screen size.

Icebreaker broke the width barrier with this cleverly designed piece, a whopping 1650p wide.

The clever bit? The guts of the email - the headline, the primary product offering, the links to the website and the mandatories - are all encapsulated within the standard 600p width (the online version is missing some of this detail). The only hint of more to come is 'Explore The Landscape' and the niggling feeling you aren't quite getting the full story. You've got to scroll a long way right - or have a very big screen - to see it in full.

Icebreaker seem to have decided not to pander much to subscribers who have images turned off. There are a lot of background images and some key text/links would be missing if images failed to render. But they have provided a 'view online' link in the pre-header.

The high image-to-text ration could impact on deliverability, but with an entirely opt-in and well-managed database, it's probably a minor issue.

And possibly it just looks so damn good, they don't really care.

UPDATE: Dylan Boyd has written more about the experimental horizontal email format on his Email Wars blog.