As many of you may know, designing html emails that look consistent across all email clients is an almost impossible task. It requires us designers to dust of html techniques that were used in the early days of the web like table layouts, inline css, and font tags. It is really a mess. The launch of Outlook 2007 recently actually made things worse. Some say it set html email design back 5 years. It has gotten to the point where a lot of designers just refuse to do it now.

Our friends over at Campaign Monitor are trying to start a revolution though and we are behind them 110%. Together maybe we can persuade the companies that make these email clients to adopt some standards so we designers can get back to doing what we do best instead of testing and tweaking html for hours on end just to get a basic layout to look proper. It worked with browsers and now most of them are up to speed with standards so it is time to move to the next obstacle.

Read more about the problem here

Read about the first step in the solution here

More to come on this...