A check-in on our progress with email clients
Hussein Al Hammad
EMC Admin
It’s always been our goal to be as transparent and open as possible. We think we owe you an update on how our efforts on getting email clients onboard our vision is going, the positives that reignite our motivations and the challenges ahead of us.
Since EMC was established we have spoken in various depths to a number of people at various roles at companies that have at least one email client as a product. These companies include Yahoo, Mailbird and IONOS (previosuly known as 1&1).
Discussed in the article:
The positives
A lot of the people we’ve spoken to agree that our vision is a good solution to the problem we are aiming to solve. That is, they welcome the idea of having a specification to follow on how HTML and CSS features are handled and/or having a open-source sanitizer any email client can use.
We also had the chance to discuss our accessibility browser extension, the Email Reader View, with some but not all of these email clients. The idea was also welcomed and some pointed out that it is a feature their audience may need.
The challenges
None of the companies we spoke with could commit to working towards this at the moment. A common theme that has come up in these conversations is if Google/Gmail are involved, then they are more likely to get involved. It is unfortunate that this is a blocker at the moment, but understandable given Gmail’s marketshare. However, we are very optimistic: email clients collaboratively work on projects such as AMP for Email and adopting standards like BIMI shows us that different competing vendors in the email space can indeed work together.
Another unexpected challenge some of these companies face, which can affect how they handle the rendering of HTML emails, is their goal to keep their users satisfied. Users often complain about how the rendering of an email message on this email client does not match how it is rendered on a major email client they also use. As a result, the company may try to match how this major email client renders email messages to some extent. We suspect there could be cases where an email client follows the EMC’s shared sanitizer specs, but also have some additional ad hoc handling on top of it and we would love to avoid that. We believe when major email clients are onboard with EMC’s shared sanitizer such issues will be minimized.
Looking ahead
We are still actively reaching out to email clients and discussing our vision as well as their pain points. We realise this is a long process and we are still committed to our vision.
If you work at (or know someone who does) a company that has an email client as a product, we would love to chat with you particularly if you are on the relevant team. Please reach out to us at admins@emailmarkup.org