I Hate HTML Emails… But I’m Still Responsible for Them, So This Is Cool.
I like the sound of the Email Standards Project
The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.
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. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for both designers and readers alike.
I don’t do HTML emails very often any more (although they still sneak through,) but we still do a ton of them at Cramer so just for my co-workers’ sake I’d love to see email clients come together the same way browser vendors have (finally) come together in order to allow us to code clean, light, standards compliant HTML emails. If I never had to rely again on the dirty tricks we use to get HTML emails to render I would be a happy man. It would also save clients money since the unwieldy beasts we send out are a lot more difficult to maintain and edit than something with nice structure would be.