Email Standards Project

Anyone who has developed HTML emails of any complexity will tell you its an incredibly painful process. The email may look completely different depending on whether the recipient views the email in Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Lotus Notes, or any of the dozens of other programs and email websites. While web development is moving swiftly to web standards that work the same on all browsers, it's the wild west when it comes to emails. As a result we are forced to go back to 'old school' table-based HTML with font tags just to get any kind of consistency in how they look. With that in mind the folks over at the Web Standards Project are starting up the Email Standards Project to try and bring the same level of standards to HTML emails that we see on the web. Here's hoping that they are wildly successful.