Introducing the Email Client Feature Support Rankings

Published:

Hussein Al Hammad

Hussein Al Hammad

EMC Admin

Can I Email? is an invaluable resource to email developers. In 2022, we brainstormed what we can do to use this data to shed a light on the level of support of features from the perspective of what impacts the end user.

When looking at Can I Email?, we frequently see certain clients supporting, or not supporting features, but how do we visualize this from a high level, and what is the impact?

Categorizing HTML/CSS features

We decided (with the blessing of Can I Email’s maintainer; Rémi Parmentier) to categorize the tested features, which would enable us to visualize the data in new ways. A category would indicate whether the support of an HTML or CSS feature is beneficial for something such as accessibility, or performance. You can now view the categorized features on the Tags page on “Can I Email?”

As a start, we are categorizing features under the following categories:

  1. Accessibility: features under this category are key to enabling assistive technology such as screen readers to be able to ingest email content. Email clients that support a majority of these features give email creators all opportunities to create accessible emails for their subscribers.
  2. Performance: features under this category are key to the success of email rendering and loading.
  3. Internationalization: This category of features outlines those that are beneficial to internationalization which would allow for developers the freedom to create semantic HTML in languages aside from English.

The Email Client Feature Support Rankings

The categorized HTML/CSS features enable us to look at the “Can I Email?” data in a different way. For example, we can now see which email clients do a good job of supporting HTML/CSS features that impact the accessibility of an HTML email.

Based on this data, we created the Email Client Feature Support Rankings in which we rank email clients in these categories based on what features they support. We hope this to become a reference not just to us, but also to email clients to evaluate whether their level of HTML/CSS features support aligns with their goals of providing their users with the best user experience possible.