Email Standards Project: Yahoo! Signs on 100%, GMail Bad
Yahoo! representatives have agreed to adhere to 100% of the recommendations for email clients made by the Email Standards Project, according to the group.
The Email Standards Project (ESP) is a campaign working to bring all the major email clients into compliance with a subset of HTML standards so that HTML emails will render appropriately everywhere.
ESP is lead by Mark Wyner, a standards-centric web design firm founder who lives in Portland, Oregon (I live there too, but we've never met.) The group rates 14 of the leading email clients based on a test and actively campaigns to increase adherence. Yahoo! has been among the most enthusiastic respondents, GMail and Outlook among the worst.
Why Standards in Email?
The group acknowledges that many designers condemn HTML emails all together but says that it's clear they are here to stay. They are too effective for marketing purposes and too compelling for users for the practice to disappear.
Unfortunately, the lack of standards compliance in receiving clients means that special design work is required beyond existing web design and HTML email regularly arrives looking ugly anyway. It's technically non-trivial for clients to deal with incoming HTML emails and spam is an issue faced more in the email world than in the standards-loving web design community at large.
Bad Google, Bad!
GMail and the other Google apps have been revolutionary in many ways. Standards compliance has not been one of them, however. My #1 question about OpenSocial has always been "why can't Google just play nicely with existing standards already under development?" Sometimes they do, OAuth for example is being supported in OpenSocial and Blogger now supports OpenID login for commenting. By and large, though, Google seems like a big bully who won't play nicely with others because they don't have to. The question of email standards seems just one more example of that.
I may be reading too much into GMail's relationship with this group (ESP) but I do know that the campaign for standards complaince in email is as worthy an effort as other standards movements. Standards are the a key foundation for innovation. We've written here before about the Inbox 2.0 of the future - I hope that standards compliance can be a part of that.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
I really hope that Gmail does take a cue from Yahoo, it would be great. I just hate it when the mail comes all fudged up, especially the ones with pictures.
"By and large, though, Google seems like a big bully who won't play nicely with others because they don't have to."
Sounds like Microsoft.
It makes me laugh, Mail Standards ?? Just like Microsofts, Google makes good products and they'll fight back :)
@J.D. - No seriously, it sounds just like Google. Trying to get they're own way.
You guys mention Y! & Gmail, but what about Hotmail?
Do email standards really matter? Email should be fairly simple with mostly text and perhaps a link or two.
Thanks for the post. We certainly don't see Google as a bully here, we know that every email client developer has a big set of pressures and goals to deal with.
It's fantastic that Yahoo has taken the time to follow up with us about their email client.
We are also working with other people from other mail clients, and we do hope to reach the right people at Google too.
As for @Mike - everyone should certainly have the choice of receiving plain text, but lots of people prefer HTML, and they should be sent nice, accessible, reliably rendered HTML instead of 1998 style coding horrors.
Check out http://www.email-standards.org/blog/entry/answers-to-common-questions/ for some more common questions about the project.
It's this kind of unwillingness to play nicely with others that will slowly chip away at Google's dominance.