Programming

The Email Standards Project: Moderating the Email Wars

    Matthew Magain
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    In the interview with David Greiner that we published today, I asked him about the forthcoming organisation that he and the Freshview team were forming to establish a baseline of standards support in email clients.

    Dave divulged that the domain for this group would be email-standards.org, and that the first incarnation of the site for this organisation would appear in the next month or so.

    So far the Email Standards Project (I’m assuming that’s what it will be called*, although the acronym ESP already stands for a heap of other things) have stated that they plan to:

    1. Establish a baseline of standards that senders of HTML email need supported in email
    2. Document the important changes each of the major email client manufacturers need to make in order to support web and related standards (Dave gave me a demo of the paid service that they will be adding to their Campaign Monitor product to facilitate this)
    3. Create a simple acid test that makes it easy to see if an email client supports this baseline, much like WaSP‘s Acid2 test.

    Web browsers have come a long way, and the Web is a whole lot better for it; the email wars, however, are only just beginning.

    *I thought it would be more fun to speculate on this than to interview Dave again.