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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.
Thumbnail of the .Mac initial test
The much improved Mobile Me rendering
When we first tested .mac, it had a lot of problems. Our email ACID test did not render very well at all, and we ranked support overall as ‘Improvement Recommended’. This was slightly suprising given then excellent rendering abilities of the Mac desktop Mail client.
So after the release of the new Mobile Me, and after the associated outages and glitches, we were very keen to run the test again. The good news is that the results were dramatically improved. Nearly all of the previous problems had been corrected, and the email rendered almost perfectly.
Background colours and images are correct, positioning of elements works well, and even list images show up. The one oddity is what you can see in the thumbnail; headings. We found that while our H1 tag rendered perfectly, H2, H3 and below would not accept styling from a stylesheet in the head.
There’s no obvious explanation for why that would be the case, but during our testing and fiddling we were not able to get it to work at all. Lower level headings remained stubbornly unaffected by margins, background colors, padding and more.
Perhaps someone from the Mobile Me team can explain? Overall though, the rendering is hugely improved, and has earned an ‘Excellent’ rating. This is another great example of how webmail clients don’t need to render poorly.
Thanks to everyone who emailed us about Mobile Me, including Georg Stadler and Stefan Kremer who both sent in screengrabs.
View the full report for Mobile Me.
Our testing with different versions of Lotus Notes has turned up mixed results so far, so we were interested to see that an iPhone version of the widely used software was in the works.
IBM has announced Lotus Notes for the iPhone will be released in 2008. According to the official site, it will “combine with the flexibility and connectivity of the Apple iPhone. To be built on the time tested IBM Lotus Domino Web Access infrastructure, users will be able to quickly access email, calendars, and contacts through the rich Apple iPhone user experience.”
The existing Apple Mail application built in to the iPhone does a very good job of rendering HTML and CSS, so we’ll be watching with interest to see how this new version of Notes does. If you have access to it, we’d love to hear from you once the product is released.
We've tested the major market email clients with our acid test so far, the ones we get the most complaints and questions about. There are plenty of other email programs out there though, on the web and on desktops.
We've received a lot of requests for people to be able to test their own preferred email client, so here's your chance. Just add your email address (the one associated with the email client you want to test) to the list below, and we will send a copy of the ACID test to that address right away.
We're always interested in hearing about email client support for HTML and CSS. In the future, we may well increase our official testing to include other clients too. Thanks again for your support of the Email Standards Project.
We’ve posted about recent changes in paragraph spacing that many people have noticed in Yahoo! Mail. An update on the Yahoo! Mail blog confirms they are aware of some problems.
Just a quick update for those of you concerned about the spacing in HTML emails. Our engineers have sleuthed out the problem, and a fix will be rolling out in the coming weeks.
Thanks to the Yahoo! team for being open about these issues and for actively working on them — a model which other email client providers would do well to follow.
Novell Groupwise is the third biggest player in the corporate email market behind Outlook Exchange and Notes. A while ago we heard from a Groupwise product manager at Novell, Alex Evans, who wanted to test against our email acid test. We sent Alex the email, and he soon had some great news for us.
Novell Groupwise, in it’s current version 7, renders the acid test perfectly, which puts it right up with Apple Mail and Yahoo Mail in terms of support for modern HTML and CSS.
This is for the Windows version of Groupwise. The excellent result also applies to the WebAccess version, and although the testing has not been completed, Linux and OSX version are also expected to meet the same levels.
Great job Novell team! We appreciate your efforts in building your product, and also in being prepared to test your client against our emails. We look forward to similar results for some other email clients in the not too distant future!
Whereas emails sent to Yahoo! webmail subscribers in the past were appearing fine, recently it seemed like the rendering had changed. Paragraph spacing was now totally removed from many emails.
Diana ran some tests and was able to confirm that the spacing did disappear in both Yahoo! classic and the new version:
This is how paragraphs will now be spaced by default.
Fortunately, this is a simple one to fix. All you need to do is add a margin-bottom of 1em (either inline or in your stylesheet) and the spacing is back.
With the addition of a 1em margin, all is well.
It’s unclear at this stage why the change has been made, but it is a timely reminder that you can’t always rely on email client default settings - if it is important to your design, it’s always best to explicitly apply styles to each element.
Thanks to everyone who reported this to us, and to Diana for doing the testing.
When we heard from Carl that "Word/Outlook 2007 HTML rendering engine does NOT fully support border styles, despite the official documentation saying otherwise", we ran a quick test of our own. That test confirmed that border styles, either inline or in the head of a document, do not render in Outlook 2007.
Here is how it should look
This is how Outlook 2007 renders the same code
Now that we have at least made contact with Google, it looks like Microsoft should be next on the list! Your ideas and suggestions are welcome. We also love to hear from you when you discover rendering issues like these, because we like to keep our reports accurate. You can email hello at emailstandards.org or leave a comment below.
When we heard from Carl that “Word/Outlook 2007 HTML rendering engine does NOT fully support border styles, despite the official documentation saying otherwise”, we ran a quick test of our own. That test confirmed that border styles, either inline or in the head of a document, do not render in Outlook 2007.
Here is how it should look
This is how Outlook 2007 renders the same code
Now that we have at least made contact with Google, it looks like Microsoft should be next on the list! Your ideas and suggestions are welcome. We also love to hear from you when you discover rendering issues like these, because we like to keep our reports accurate. You can email hello at emailstandards.org or leave a comment below.
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