The Email Standards Project launches

Published November 28, 2007 by David Greiner

After a couple of months of hard work and some amazing help from others, I'm excited to announce that the Email Standards Project site has just officially launched.

First off, I wanted to say a huge thanks to a few people:

Luke Stevens for his awesome hard work on the design and build of the site. Luke's worked incredibly hard, especially in the last few days to make the site a reality.
Mark Wyner, our fearless tester and standards guru for being patient enough to test and document every major email client out there.
The entire Freshview team, especially Mat for managing the Facebook group and having a hand in just about everything else.

What's on email-standards.org?

If you're after a quick background on how the whole idea started, check out my rant from a few months back. Here's a quick overview of what the site currently includes:

An overview of the project, it's aims and background.
A short article about why web standards are important for email.
A series of reports on the current state of standards support in each major email client, including suggestions for improvement.
The Email Standards Project blog, focusing on news about the project and about email standards. We'd love to see your contributions here!
Information about how people like you can be involved and help the Email Standards Project make a difference.

How can you help right now?

The most immediate way that everybody can help is to make your voice heard. Use your blog, newsletter or website to mention the launch of the Email Standards Project, and to discuss why you think it is important and worth checking out.

It would be fantastic if we could get as many people as possible posting about this. If you don't have a blog, then you could contribute your thoughts as a comment on our blog or someone else's post, and help to build interest in that way. We've put together some other ideas you might consider.

HTML emails have been languishing for too long, and now it is time to get involved and make something happen. If you have any questions, or suggestions for how we can further the cause, please get in touch or leave a comment on the ESP site.

9 Comments

Posted in: Observations & Answers

9 Comments

riki
November 29, 2007 1:35am

Excellent work, good luck with this.
mattymcg
November 29, 2007 10:49pm

Congratulations guys on taking leadership on this issue. The site looks great.
Phil Thompson
November 30, 2007 12:07am

I’m very excited about this new project. Heavens knows creating a good quality HTML email is a nightmare at the moment compared to creating a website.
Misty Beier
November 30, 2007 8:08am

This is terrific! Such a great help for web designers on this. Thanks for taking the wheel on this issue.
Much luck!
Stig
November 30, 2007 11:06am

I’m loving the “State of the clients” sidebar! Gets right to the point, and makes for an excellent pillory :)

All in all, you’ve done an extremely good job with the whole site.

Wouldn’t a petition make sense too?
Dave Greiner
November 30, 2007 5:12pm

Thanks Stig, we definitely gave some through to that option, but I’ve seen similar ones in the past that seem to fade and die. We were instead hoping to get as much email client attention as possible by getting everyone to post about the issue on their own blog, which has certainly been a huge success so far. Only time will tell how this strategy will work.
Stig
November 30, 2007 10:04pm

Yeah, I see your point, Dave. I absolutely think your approach is more powerful. I was just wondering why you didn’t have a petition as well, as it would probably be the lowest threshold for people to let their voice be heard. But, like I said, I definately see your point.
frazeologizmy
August 23, 2008 9:01pm

Thanks for great review,

however good quality HTML email is a nightmare at the moment compared to creating a website.

Keep working…
Szyby samochodowe
August 29, 2008 11:20pm

I agree with the predecessor.. Every email is surrounded in the attractive background but content is the most important. I use aol webmail which contains a lot of possibility I am satisfied. Best Regards :)

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