First there were desktop email clients, with their various differing capabilities. Then webmail clients became popular, making a free email address accessible to just about anyone. Today’s biggest growing area is mobile email clients on devices like the iPhone and Blackberry.

When you design and build an email you can’t know for sure which email client will be displaying it for any particular person. To find out the HTML and CSS rendering capabilities of mobile email clients, Gregg Oldring of Mailout Interactive took our email acid test and put it to work.

Gregg has posted his results on his blog and they are well worth checking out. He ran our acid test through a BlackBerry Bold, a BlackBerry Curve, a BlackBerry Pearl, an iPod Touch running the iPhone 2.1 Software Upgrade, an iPhone running 2.2 Software Upgrade, a Treo running Palm OS and a Treo running Windows.

Gregg’s results provide some interesting details – changes in rendering between iPhone software in 2.1 and 2.2 that actually break some parts of our test, for example. He also goes on to make a couple of suggestions for emailing to mobile clients, basically simplifying and reducing the width.

Make sure to click through and see the full mobile email results. Thanks Gregg for your work! If you’ve run your own tests, we’d love to hear about it, please comment below.

Welcome to 2009! While most of us are enjoying the marvels and advances of the new millenium, HTML email rendering is still back in the 1990s, hanging out with structural tables and inline styles.

When we launched the Email Standards Project, we had a huge amount of support from people like you, web designers who were sick of having to deal with huge variations in the way their emails looked in the many different email clients. Although many people doubted that we could change things, we all felt something had to be done.

Since then, we have worked with worked with Yahoo! to improve their (already excellent) results, and talked to developers at Google about improving Gmail, and IBM about improving Lotus Notes.

It’s a slow process, but there is far more useful discussion of HTML email than there ever was before we started, and the signs are there for real change. We want to say thank you to all of you who have blogged about the project, contributed your own findings, spoken to contacts at email client developers, tweeted about us and more.

It is your efforts that have got us this far, and we’ll be relying on your help this year too. Here’s a quick outline of what we’ve got planned for 2009:

• Updated, more detailed email client testing — We’re going to extend our testing to cover more elements and design techniques. We’ll also look at adding other popular email clients. However, we’re still not going to test older versions, only the ones which have a chance of being updated.
• Projects to get attention from client developers — After our Gmail Grimaces got us in touch with a couple of Google engineers, we had lots of suggestions to do something similar for the Outlook team. We’ll search for ways to reach the right people.
• Open conversation with email program providers — As far as possible, we want to open up the conversation between designers of HTML emails, and email client providers. If we can understand each other better, we have more chance of things progressing.

In broad terms, those are the things we’ll be focusing on. Of course, we’ll continue to keep you up to date with changes in the email rendering landscape through this blog. If you have any suggestions, requests or questions, please leave them in the comments. You can also join our Facebook group to keep up to date.

Let’s make 2009 a good year for HTML email designers!