The dedicated folks at E-mail Standards Project has just launched their 2008 Gmail Appeal campaign which aims to make enough noise within the internet and hopefully convince Google to make their e-mail client more XHTML/CSS friendly.
Here is the video…
Email Standards Project – Gmail Grimaces from Mathew Patterson on Vimeo.
One of the things I encounter on a daily basis are HTML e-mail creatives not playing well with Gmail. A lot of times I am put in a situation where I am forced to use <font> tags, tables and other deprecated HTML code for my e-mail creative to “work”.
If the web design people have already adjusted well into the world of XHTML and CSS 2.0, then why are e-mail clients still rendering e-mail as if it was still 1998? The possible benefits of having a universal standard in place are numerous but most the important of these are lower bandwidth costs, improved client performance and enhanced presentation for mobile users and text-only email clients.
There are already a lot of e-mail clients with strong support for rendering XHTML/CSS e-mail creatives. These clients are AOL Webmail, Apple Mail, Eudora (Penelope), Microsoft Entourage, Mozilla Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail, Windows Mail, Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Mail (Classic).
Other e-mail clients which badly need to improve support for web standards are Apple .Mac, Lotus Notes 8, Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Windows Live Hotmail.
The E-mail Standards Project aims for designers to be able to rely on a solid, consistent level of web standards support in designing and building HTML emails. This will make our lives easier so we don’t have to grimace or make ugly faces whenever e-mail clients don’t render well. 
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10 Comments
you know what I dont want is that with Gtalk, everytime i listen to my winamp and put my status to the music i listen i get hanged
as in hang ha inde nagbigti, lol!
But this project is something to look forward too..
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Gmail would rock so much more if it had better it support for CSS and XHTML.
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Hey dude, I don’t use Gmail, panget kasi interface. If they make it XHTML/CSS friendly, i might consider using it. Btw, big thanks for the banner placement. Got yours too.
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I happen to like the functionality which Gmail offers.
I use Google Apps for your domain and manage a few dozen e-mail addresses from a single interface.
What I can’t take is how they render HTML E-mail which is far from existing web standards being used with web browsers.
It might take a year or two (I hope sooner) before someone from Google updates their e-mail client.
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dunno really i wasn’t that google fan since i started my online life
yet i’d love to see gmail getting more flexible
long live GMX
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Hey, I used to have GMX a few years back, never knew it had a new and better look. I might give it a try this weekend.
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Sorry guys but I’m not with you on this. I think it would just add to clutter. I love GMAIL just as it is today.
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Maybe I should explain it a bit further to clarify a few points.
I do not find anything wrong with GMail’s interface and the standards ESP are pushing for pertains to how messages are being rendered.
GMail renders a e-mails differently from Yahoo Mail. Which causes larger e-mail files, longer loading times and the unsightly rendering of text and background images on the e-mail message.
For example, If I would make a new e-mail creative for use in our company’s marketing campaigns, I would have to put up with non-standard deprecated code for it to work on GMail and Yahoo and the rest.
Having a standard in place changes that. It simplifies the process and you’d get to concentrate more on the design and not on how to make your design work on GMail or Lotus Notes.
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I love Gmail as it is now! It’s clean and really fast unlike Hotmail or Yahoo! The only thing that I would like to see it’s that you could adjust/change the colors of Gmail instead of the standard blue! But again, I love Gmail as it is now!
This is one very misunderstood post
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