New Strides for Email Standards

Being in charge of the LevelTen In-site Newsletter, I have been frustrated with the lack of consistency of the rendering of our newsletter in different email clients. Outlook 2007 strips away any CSS padding, margin, and float styles, which results in mashed-up text and inconsistent spacing. Gmail has even received bad marks on its rendering. Each email client offers different support for what features it will allow in emails. Despite these difficulties, there is an established project that has come about to help set the standard for email clients and email designs. I first read about the Email Standards Project on the Campaign Monitor blog. Campaign Monitor is a program that we use to send out our newsletters and Campaign Monitor staff is leading the project. On the Email Standards Project website, they state their goal: “Our goal is to help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently.” The project gives several reasons for why email standards are important. The one that sticks out to me the most is that having standards will remove the guess work from email design. This means I would no longer have to hear Nicholas’ (one of our web developers) curse words coming from the back of the room. Standards would create the peace of mind that an email design will look the same in all email clients.