When we first tested Lotus Notes 8 we were using the readily accessible POP/IMAP version of the service. Although we did not know it at the time, there is a very significant difference between that version and Lotus Notes running on Domino Server.

A representative from IBM contacted us very soon after the Email Standards Project site launched to let us know, and we updated the results with a message explaining the version we tested on. We’ve been in conversation with IBM since then, and wanted to keep you all up to date with the situation.

Lotus Notes (Domino Server) vs Lotus Notes (POP/IMAP)

As you can see in these partial screenshots, the Domino server version renders much closer to our Acid Test. IBM tells us that almost 90% of their customers are using Lotus Notes 8 with Domino Server, which use Internet Explorer for HTML email rendering when viewing emails. This is great news! Your subscribers on Notes may be getting a better experience than previously thought.

However, 10% of (a very large number) is still a lot of people, and since there is not any immediate way to know which version any person is using, you can’t necessarily rest easy. IBM tell us that there is internal attention being paid to this issue, and that there is a push on to have the POP version improve support in a future version. There are no promises yet that this will actually happen, but they are listening, and the Email Standards Project has made an impact.

So our thanks to IBM for their responsiveness, and their willingness to be open to discussion on this, even if they are not able to make changes immediately. We look forward to continuing the conversation. Now if we could just find someone from Gmail with the same approach…

From Paul Boag and Headscape in the UK comes the weekly web design podcast, Boagworld. This week Mat Patterson was on the show to talk about the Email Standards Project.

Check out podcast 105 for the full recording and show notes. This is another way of spreading the message of the Email Standards Project to working web designers who may not have heard about it yet. We’d love for all you guys to spread the message yourselves, by mentioning it on your own podcast, or contributing to other people’s blogs or shows.

Thanks also to everyone who blogged about the recent Yahoo! announcement, it is great to keep the buzz going.

I find it truly amazing how responsive the folks at Yahoo! have been to many of the articles/posts I have written. They are actively involved in community discussions and receptive to notes about how things can be improved. This time, they respond to our call for standards-based email clients.

What strikes me profoundly is that while they have been ranked among the best performing email clients (regarding support for web standards) they are still unsatisfied. They want to support 100% of our recommendations, and for that they have my applause. Oh, those over achievers.

We reported that Yahoo! Mail (both New and Classic) supports our entire list sans list-style-image. Brian Goodman of the Yahoo! Mail team contacted us to report that they believed their client did indeed support that property. As we discussed possible variables which might be altering the results on various platforms, etc., we discovered that the problem actually resides with a shortcoming Yahoo! Mail has with CSS shorthand. As it turns out list-style-image is supported while list-style is not.

But most seasoned web designers use shorthand because it saves time and bytes. Especially in the email environment where every byte is valuable. The folks at Yahoo! Mail could have shrugged their shoulders and walked away, satisfied with their level of support. But they decided that support for shorthand is important and are going to do something about it.

I am happy to report that Yahoo! Mail has responded to our call! They are going to dig into their application, find the source of this deficiency and crush it. Yes, folks, with one of their future releases Yahoo! Mail will support 100% of our recommendations. When we see this come to fruition we will report the news, so stay tuned.

Thank you, Yahoo!

When Gmail first launched, and people were selling invitations for it on Ebay, it was easy to see why. A vastly faster and more efficient interface coupled with huge storage made for a really significant step in email via the web.

Web designers and tech heads loved it, and in fact all of our Email Standards Project email is accessed via Gmail. However, in one area Gmail has always lagged behind a little — rendering of CSS in HTML email. Whereas almost every other email client will render (with varying degrees of success) CSS from the head of an HTML document, Gmail strips it out completely.

It’s a confusing situation, because it’s not like you can’t use CSS at all in Gmail, you just have to code it inline. When you do, support is reasonably good, at least for the basics. Without going through the hassle of inline styles, you end up with what you see in our Gmail report, an unstyled page. Sure it degrades well, but it seems an odd distinction to make.

It’s not just us here at ESP that think so. Since the Email Standards Project launched, the Gmail report has been (after the homepage) by far the most popular page on the site. A lot of people are confused about how to get their emails showing up properly in Gmail.

We know that somewhere out there, somebody who has visited this site knows the right person from the Gmail team who can help us to understand why Gmail works the way it does. We have no doubt that it was done for a reason, probably a great, sensible, defensible reason.

All we want to do is start that conversation, to see if there is a way we can help the Gmail team improve the support for web standards without compromising their other requirements. So if you know somebody who could help, or somebody who might know that person - get in touch! We’ll either end up contacting the right person, or Kevin Bacon, so it’s win-win!

Even if you don’t know anyone, you can help the cause by commenting on this Google group asking Google to consider adding better support for CSS and HTML standards, because every voice counts.

Of course, if you are someone from the Gmail team, then we’d love to hear from you directly, because we really are here to be as helpful as possible. Gmail is great, but a Gmail that supported web standards would be even better.

Email Standards Project supporter and talented designer Doug Neiner has answered the call for some Email Standards Project bling with a great t-shirt design.

Great work Doug - I’d wear that for sure! The ‘support the future of email’ is also a good tagline. We’d love to hear what you all think about Doug’s work, so leave a comment below. If you’ve got your own ideas for taglines, shirts, tattoos, or anything else, then let us know.

Grab the logo files from the What you can do page and get cracking. One way or another we will use some of your ideas to promote the Email Standards Project, and we know there is a ton of talent who support what we are trying to do here.

P.S. My contribution to the taglines is “I believe in ESP — the Email Standards Project”. What have you got?

Apparently we have not made this clear enough yet, so I wanted to say it explicitly:

Everybody should get the choice to receive HTML or plain text

If you personally prefer text-only email, you should always be able to set your email client to show plain text, and all your newsletters should a have plain text alternative for you to read. We totally agree! The Email Standards Project is trying to improve the rendering of the HTML portion of the email, not to get rid of the text portion, so there is no need to worry.