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.

Please send me your email ACID test

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.

Only a few days after the release of our 2008 Gmail Appeal video, we have had some success!

Although in the initial launch of the Email Standards Project we did not hear from Google at all, last week we heard from a Google Engineer who (although we can’t currently publish his name and details) is in a great position to investigate and perhaps make some improvements.

Thanks to the excellent 20% time offered to Google staff, a passionate engineer who has seen our video is going to use his time to explore what the situation is regarding Gmail’s rendering, and how it might be improved.

Although 20% of one person’s time might seem a small amount, it is a huge win that we have made contact with someone who has the right contacts and skills, and is willing to talk to us. Thanks go to everybody who took part in Project Gmail Grimace, and everyone who has promoted the Email Standards Project in any way.

We’re really excited about this, and looking forward to some progress at some point in the future. Please leave a comment thanking our Google friend below!

Recently we posted the Gmail Appeal video put together from many of your excellent photos. We couldn’t squeeze all the photos in unfortunately, and still the keep the video a reasonable length.

No need to lament if you missed out though, because here is your chance to download all the photos and put together your own Gmail video (or other project) to reach the right people at Gmail and start a conversation with them. Just download the zip file, which contains 60+ photos, plus an Email Standards Project logo and a Gmail logo, and get started.

Once you’ve got your project done, be sure to let us know and we can point to it from here too, so others can check it out. I’m sure you guys are full of excellent ideas and we’d love to see what you come up with.

Download the full set of Gmail Grimaces (5.7mb zip).

Recently we posted the Gmail Appeal video put together from many of your excellent photos. We couldn’t squeeze all the photos in unfortunately, and still the keep the video a reasonable length.

No need to lament if you missed out though, because here is your chance to download all the photos and put together your own Gmail video (or other project) to reach the right people at Gmail and start a conversation with them. Just download the zip file, which contains 60+ photos, plus an Email Standards Project logo and a Gmail logo, and get started.

Once you’ve got your project done, be sure to let us know and we can point to it from here too, so others can check it out. I’m sure you guys are full of excellent ideas and we’d love to see what you come up with.

Download the full set of Gmail Grimaces (5.7mb zip).

Thanks to the fantastic (and at times horrifying!) collection of faces sent in to our Gmail Grimaces group, we’ve put together a short video appeal to the Gmail team. We’d love it if you could check out the video, and then start plugging it however you can.

Blog about it, send it to your web design group, re-enact it in the foyer of your office building…anything you can do to get this video seen as many times as we can, so that we can eventually reach the right people. We’ll also be uploading all the images so you can make your own video very soon. Watch the 2008 Gmail Appeal.