The Email Standards Project is a future looking group. We’re working on improving current and future email clients so they render standard HTML and CSS more consistently. That’s the goal, but what about all of us who need to send emails out right now?
We’re often asked for advice on how to get the best results given the current state of the email client market. Here’s our top picks to get you started with building an email that will work well for your readers right now. You’ll notice they are from Campaign Monitor, which is built by the same team that started the Email Standards Project (full disclosure achieved!).
Our email ACID test doesn’t cover everything, and it is more focused on individual, current clients. For the bigger picture see the Guide to CSS support in email clients (2008).
You may notice some differences, where support is spotty for certain elements and we’ve tested in different ways. Watch out for an expanded ACID test later this year to provide more clarity.
For general advice on what to put into your emails, what not to, and how to approach it see the Email design guidelines.
To save time in working out a structure that does not fall apart in one of the popular email clients, you can start with free, tested email templates that you can take, modify and reuse.
At Campaign Monitor we’ve been collecting statistics from millions of emails sent out, and compiled an email client popularity report (the unsurprising news is that Outlook still dominates).
Ever wanted to replicate a table and its contents in MS SQL?
heres how:
SELECT * INTO NewTable FROM OldTable
Want to copy just the structure and not the content?
SELECT TOP 0 * INTO NewTable from OldTable
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:
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!
Microsoft has issued a security patch to fix a critical vulnerability in its Internet Explorer browser it said has attacked over 2m Windows users.
The flaw is believed to have already infected as many as 10,000 websites.
The “zero day” exploit let criminals take over victims’ computers by steering them to infected websites.
Microsoft’s Christopher Budd said the software giant “encourages all IE customers to test and deploy this update as soon as possible”.
He also said the threat lead Microsoft to mobilize security engineering teams worldwide to deliver a software cure “in the unprecedented time of eight days”.
The company’s security response team said the patch consists of more than 300 distinct updates for more than half-a-dozen versions of IE in around 50 languages.
“Even with that, the release Emergency Response process isn’t over,” said Security Response Alliance director Mike Reavey.
“There is additional support to customers and additional refinement of our product development efforts.”
Microsoft stressed that the flaw was proven to exist only in IE 7 on all applicable versions of Windows, but that IE 6 and the “beta” release of IE 8 were “potentially vulnerable”.
Users who have automatic updates turned on will receive the patch over the next 24 hours while others can access it via a download.
‘Wildfire’
The AZN Trojan has been making the rounds since the beginning of December but became public knowledge in the last week . Unlike other exploits, users only have to visit a malicious site with Trojans or other malware in order to become contaminated.
Firefox update
The update is something of an unusual move for Microsoft and underscores the seriousness of the zero day flaw.
The company rarely issues security fixes for its software outside of its regular monthly patch updates.
Meanwhile Mozilla has released a scheduled update for its open source Firefox web browsers for at least 10 different vulnerabilities.
The bugs in the browser could have been “used to run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing,” said Mozilla.
It is also reissuing calls for users to upgrade from Firefox 2.0 to Firefox 3.0 as soon as possible and said it is “not planning any further security and stability updates for Firefox 2″.
This means Mozilla will no longer support the Firefox 2 browser against future online scams and attacks.
Source: BBC News – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7788687.stm
Users of the Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.
The flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people’s computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say.
Microsoft urged people to be vigilant while it investigated and prepared an emergency patch to resolve it.
Internet Explorer is used by the vast majority of the world’s computer users.
“Microsoft is continuing its investigation of public reports of attacks against a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer,” said the firm in a security advisory alert about the flaw.
Microsoft says it has detected attacks against IE 7.0 but said the “underlying vulnerability” was present in all versions of the browser.
Other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, are not vulnerable to the flaw Microsoft has identified.
As many as 10,000 websites have been compromised since last week to take advantage of the security flaw, said antivirus software maker Trend Micro.
The websites have been mostly serving up programs that steal computer game passwords, but the flaw could be “adopted by more financially motivated criminals”, a Trend Micro security researcher said on Monday.
PC Pro magazine’s security editor, Darien Graham-Smith, said that there was a virtual arms race going on, with hackers always on the look out for new vulnerabilities.
“The message needs to get out that this malicious code can be planted on any web site, so simple careful browsing isn’t enough.”
“It’s a shame Microsoft have not been able to fix this more quickly, but letting people know about this flaw was the right thing to do. If you keep flaws like this quiet, people are put at risk without knowing it.”
“Every browser is susceptible to vulnerabilities from time to time. It’s fine to say ‘don’t use Internet Explorer’ for now, but other browsers may well find themselves in a similar situation,” he added.
Source: BBC News – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7784908.stm
Other browsers:
We are looking for new features to be added to this plugin, please leave your requests in the comments on the following page : JQuery / PHP Upload and Crop – Feature Request
Finally we had some time to create a full jquery image upload and crop script for php. This latest script is based on the first few versions of PHP & jQuery image upload and crop.
As before you will need the following:
If you’re interested, you can grab the new beta by visiting the Windows Live blog. The new version of Windows Live Mail doesn’t seem to be any different in rendering our acid test compared to previous versions since most of the changes seem to be part of their Windows Live Suite. This is good news though since Windows Live Mail is actually a very decent mail application and we can only hope the rest of Microsoft’s mail teams are taking notes.
Just a quick note to mention that my opinion piece in .net Magazine (as mentioned earlier) has now been published on the magazine site. We should see some more interest in the Email Standards Project from this!
PHP & jQuery image upload and crop v1.1
We are looking for new features to be added to this plugin, please leave your requests in the comments on the following page : JQuery / PHP Upload and Crop – Feature Request
Due to popular demand, further updates have been made to this script, to allow upload of JPG, GIFs and PNG images! Same great functionality now even more useful.
Please note the old script is still available at PHP & jQuery image upload and crop.
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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle