Standards for email are a worthwhile cause.

There are standards for email. > http://www.imc.org/rfcs.html

That being said however. If we all waited for ‘standards’ to change instead of pushing the boundaries. Standards would never change or surely change at such a snail’s pace, we’d all still be designing in table structure.

The unfortunate thing with ‘standards’ is they only define what ‘is’ and not ‘what could be’ often making them stifling to your project.

Look at things like the iframe for example. iframe is/was a handy little thing which took a long time to become standards compliant. However, enough people bought into this ‘microsoft’ tag that all browsers and w3 adopted it.

It’s called progress.

Standards for email would be a godsend on so many fronts. Even the text only crowd should be concerned that there are no standards for email. (Didn’t you find it disappointing that the ascii art you spent hours working on didn’t show up as fixed width font when you sent it to that cute girl in communications?)

I tried emailing the Web Standards Project to express my interest in volunteering but their email bounced (don’t get me started about lack of standards around bounce messages).

I’ve also tried to rally a group at the Email Experience Council but so far there are no takers.

I make good money as a result of the mess created by the lack of standards for email but I’m happy to give up email design if it means that email would be accessible and usable for all.

I hope this discussion gets people fired up. Standards for email are a worthwhile cause.

So the contention that HTML always communicates more effectively is bogus. It might, if you see something other than a screen full of tags.

To comply with the standards, a web browser must be able to process HTML and display it to the user. An email client, *by the standards*, must display plain text, full stop. The standards don’t require HTML in an email client.

I agree with parts of many of the points raised, but it seems to me there should be some ‘middle way’ between the overblown excesses of a multicorp adfest and plain old ascii. I now wear glasses, and peering at tightly-bunched, unformatted stuff that looks like something from the era of The Rockford Files bugs me in a different way from wading through screeds of pointless images from Getty. I sometimes want a little ‘soft sell’, and a little whitespace, with my info. Surely something akin to Markdown for the masses is not too much to ask?

However, think again when recommending plain text as a good solution as it is: ‘ASCII means never having to say you’re sorry.’
Maybe for you, English-speaking friend, but not for us, whose alphabet contains more letters and/or accents than the English alphabet. For us, ASCII has been really pain in the ass for a long time now. I’m not talking about missing localized keyboards and key-code switching madness, but also sending an e-mail through servers using 7 bits (and thus cutting some extra letters/characters we used). For us, a unified character-layout, like UTF-8 can be a dream came true – we wished for nearly a decade.
I would like to poit out, that even in case of opting for plain text, a common and usable standard charset is necessary, so as we could be able to communicate flawlessly.