Will there ever be an email standard?
TL;DR: TD,TR aren’t good, but we’re stuck with them.
As you may or may not know, the HTML standard for email is a mess. There is no defined standard, it is more a way of coding that is a reliable as we can get in as many email platforms as we can. It is easy to dismiss it as coding for 1995 – and the table based approach has its roots from that era – but there is at least a dash of some more modern code in order to apply fixes and add enhancement.
iOS 8 Mail: The video tag is missing in action
We’ve been doing some testing with Apple’s production release of iOS8, naturally focusing on the mail client, and one of the main findings so far has been a lack of support for the <video> tag.
Testing our recent studio moving email loads the poster image, but the play button doesn’t seem to function properly.
We’ve also done some initial testing around different file formats and file names, but we’ve not been able to get past the bug yet. It does at least feel like this could be the issue though, as it does seem to attempt to load the video.
iOS, and Apple platforms in general, have a good level of support for HTML5 (as far as email goes), so it remains to be seen whether this will be fixed in a future release.
Render Testing Mailbox for Mac
As you may have seen, the beta for Mailbox for Mac was released a couple of days ago. We thought we’d do a few quick tests to see how it’s rendering engine held up.
First we sent #emailweekly, which is a template we’ve built using fluid-responsive hybrid coding. It behaves in much the same way as most other email clients.
How we made the #emailweekly newsletter
Last week we sent our first #emailweekly newsletter, which replaces our old feedburner email alert that auto-sent when we’d written a new blog post. Now, being a blog about email design, we were never really happy with how the old emails looked, but at the time it did a job and we had more pressing things to do. This time around though, we thought we’d try out a few ideas.
Gmail introduces a new look, social style, Promotions tab
Much has been made of Google’s previous efforts to split the Gmail inbox into different tabs. In their first incarnation, messages were sorted into either Primary, Social, Updates or Promotions sections based on their content. Marketers’ reactions were varied, but there was a general consensus that being in the Promotions tab was the lesser option, compared to being in the Primary one.
However yesterday Gmail announced an innovation that may change all that.
Rolling out shortly, messages in the promotions tab will be displayed in a new Pinterest style grid, most importantly including a promotional image and a sender logo.