David Emery Online

Electronic Envelopes

27 November 2007

HTML email is not what I would traditionally call a thrilling and exciting topic for a blog post, but I would like to think that – as readers of this site – you’re not really expecting much in the way of thrills anyway.

So, HTML email then.

I – probably like you, if you care enough still to be reading – was utterly unconvinced by HTML email at first. “HTML email is all spam” I thought. “Email should all be plain text…” I swore “it’s just the way it was designed to be”. Notice the utter lack of actual reasoning here, just a slightly odd dislike of something for no apparent reason.

After a while I started getting a bit of pressure. “Ooohh, look at this nice email I just got from xyz – can we do something similar?” they would say and, quite frankly, they were right. It was nice. Of course, the rod for my back was duly made and now we churn out 2 or 3 HTML emails a week (thank god I don’t have to make them all these days).

They really are better though.

In fact, they are better in every way which makes me wonder why on earth there is such a resentment towards them? They really remind me of web page – these days they practically are web pages, though delivered to the user in a different form – and who would reasonably argue that web pages should be plain text? Emails – and it’s probably worth making the distinction between person to person emails and business/group to person emails, of which I’m talking about the latter – are first and foremost conduits for information, and there is absolutely no doubt that information can be presented in a much clearer way using HTML (different font sizes, spacing, colours etc) then it can be in plain text.

Ok then. HTML email is great. So we should just do it all the time, right? No problem – it’s just HTML, so if you can write HTML you can write HTML email? Right?

If only.

HTML email is like trying to code websites in 1998, but less predictable. Each and every mail client renders HTML in a different way. Some – like Apple Mail, for example – render it perfectly. Some, like Microsoft Outlook 2007, are pretty appalling not even supporting a lot of basic CSS.

Which is why I’m very excited by the just-lauched Email Standards Project.

The Email Standards Project is setting out to take the evangelism and power that transformed the browser landscape and turn it towards doing the same for email clients. I sure hope they have some success; the browser war has been won, the email war is only just beginning.