Getting some Gmail attention
Last year Gmail asked their users to contribute to a collaborative video featuring the Gmail 'M'. This year they are doing something similar with their story videos. These are pretty cool, a smart idea well executed.
Here at the Email Standards Project we're not above borrowing a good idea, especially if it could help get some attention from Google! We're going to put together our own video from photos you guys send in. Here's the plan:
Project Gmail Grimace
Step 1. Make a face: We want to collect as many as possible head shots of web designers showing the face they make when trying to get their emails to render properly in Gmail. We know that Gmail has a few issues, and we've all made some faces out of frustration. So grab a camera, a webcam, a set of crayons or whatever, and capture that moment when you really can't take it any more.
Step 2. Join the Flickr group: We've setup a Flickr group Project Gmail Grimace that is open to all. You should jump over and join the group, all free.
Step 3. Post your photo: Upload your photo to your own Flickr account, and go to the photo's page. Click the "Send to Group" button between the photo title and the photo. Then choose the "Project Gmail Grimace" group.
That's it! We'll start collecting photos and when we have a reasonable number, cut them together somehow and make a nice video message to hopefully attract some attention from the right people at Google. I'm sure that among all you Email Standards Project supporters there is plenty of talent who could help us do that. This is just a fun way to keep the momentum going and make ourselves heard. Everyone can participate - even if you don't have a Flickr account, send us your photos directly.
Project Gmail Grimace is go!
Verry good idea !
Make it in a buzz ;)
Great idea!
I’m curious about the result…
Good call! I’ll have mine up soon-ish.
Nice idea. I’ve added mine - looking forward to seeing the end result.
I got word back from my Google manager friend that he’d passed my email on to someone from the Gmail team, but I haven’t heard anything since then. I don’t think any responses were added to the Gmail Discussion group since someone suggested using the “Suggest a feature” option.
Perhaps everyone should drop their two cents into the suggest a feature box, which is available here:
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=suggest
Hilarious idea! Here’s hoping someone at Google will think so too and pass it along to The Powers That Be.
@alex leonard
and if everyone ticks “do my laundry” who knows, they have enough money.
This is totally great idea. There are 21 photos just right now. I think I will send mine’s.
I actually _like_ the way Gmail renders e-mail messages and if they choose to add support for background colors/images etc. I really hope they also add an option to opt out of those “improvements”.
i jioned to flickr group.my nick is flicker4everr .And thast great idea.now there is 27 photos.
Do you also like the way IE3 renders web pages Michal?
Spreading the word now:
http://www.pixelapes.com/2008/02/04/gmail-makes-people-grimace/
It occurred to me that of the list of clients that have had the acid test it seems that Outlook 2003 and Outlook Express are missing. Is this because there is no possibility of Microsoft going back and updating these outdated programs?
It’s just that I can imagine that a lot of people use Outlook Express still, and certainly there will be a lot of users of Outlook 2003. Lots of people don’t upgrade these programs for a long time.
Also, is there any plan of attack on Redmond?! Any links to the MS Office team?
An excellent idea!
Thanks for the blog post Alex. You are right, the reason we haven’t tested older clients is because we don’t expect Microsoft to fix outdated versions, we’re concentrating on the future.
We do have some plans re: Microsoft too - stay tuned.
Gmail doesn’t render html right?
hmm, no gmail account, and no html email so I hadn’t noticed.
[ more likely to get a grimace when I even get an html email, since my client is configured to only display text. ]
just a silent video? no audio track?
that would be a simple thing to use animated gif or mng [ animated png ] for. if you want synchronised audio with it, file size for easy bandwidth [ data transfer ] consumption try ogg video.
[ really small file size with good quality audio and video, I just did 5 video tutorials on installing and configuring linux, the default ogg files are drastically smaller than xvid encoded avi files are. ]
The actual install, 15 minutes long:
Install OGG video 25.7 MB
Install AVI video 76.7 MB
exact same video, just different codec used.
the largest of the 5, at just over 27 minutes:
Package Manager 2 OGG video 49.9 MB
Package Manager 2 AVI video 183.3 MB
Is anyone from this group actual in contact with Google? It seems like there needs to be some sort of open dialogue channel so that gmail can get the improvements it so desperately needs. I’m sure Google don’t like the fact that their email client is worse than Microsoft’s?
Please, background images in e-mail are for kiddies and spammers. Think of the abortion that is IncrediMail, for chrissakes.
Gmail is the best e-mail experience out there, desktop or web. It doesn’t make sense to beg for its sabotage.
Try telling my clients that! I expect the same functionality as a browser simply because the companies that I have worked for have come to expect simple behaviour. If I now turn around and say “background images in e-mail are for kiddies and spammers” they will tell me shut up and do it.
I send and receive literally thousands of e-mails a year (the majority of them business related). I’m not talking about bulk e-mailing, but solicited, one-on-one e-mails. In well over a decade, spanning tens of thousands of individual e-mails, not ONCE has a background image been useful.
Spammers use background images. Amateurs and AOL users plague us with background images. My amateur AOL user mother thinks background images are cool. She also likes IncrediMail.
Why would any professional outside of a spammer need to send a background image?
Chas,
I agree, background images aren’t needed.
But an email application still needs to be able to display them properly, since the specification includes them.
I see your point. Maybe there should be different revisions of such a specification; E-mail Spec 1.0a Lean, and E-mail Spec 1.0a Standard, and E-mail Spec 1.0a Obese, for example, the former containing none of the superfluous bits.
Whaddaya think?
Background images on websites aren’t necessary either but in the caring hands of a designer they can look quite nice and make the experience more beneficial.
This isn’t a request for more features, just a request that gmail conform to the spec.
I disagree with Chris, I am asked to create emails for large client projects where they want the brand to be consistent with their site design. Using background images makes it much easier to create a layout with much less markup, ie. you don’t have to use tables and you don’t have to convert your text into images.
As it stands right now I have no option but to use tables for emails so that I can have a background image, it would make much more sense for me to be able to use background images on individual elements.
Chris obviously I don’t know what you do but for me working at ad agencies and web agencies html emails are never text only, or text with a few images, they are designed to look like the brand website.
Chas,
That is an entirely different issue. changing the spec is beyond the purpose of this group I think.
Jon,
Client’s might want their email to look like their website, but if that means using a background image, then their website should be redesigned to make that not required if at all possible.
Ideally, they should offer those on their email list the option of html or plain text emails.
[ and whatever they do, never send as both in one email, that is a disgusting option, those who do not want html do not want it at all ]
Okay, color me convinced. As long as I can toggle this feature off, I’m happy.
Jacqui of course we always give the user the option of html or text.
Redesigning a clients site just to change their email is one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard.
Thats a great idea. I am in for a weird head shot. How about the idea of signing a petition to get some attention? That can even work with other email clients.
To all those arguing about CSS forcing a background image upon their precious email client, the _whole point_ of CSS is that it authors’ should be overridable by users’ styles. If Google came up with a half-decent implementation, you’d have a trivial way of overriding the whims of web designers: “* { background-image: none; }”. Your browser should also be letting you do this.
Good. curious about the result
Hey guys, nice call with these - love the Flickr group. I just tried to trackback you but found that your trackback things returning errors. Keep it up - I’ve now subscribed to your RSS feed to try and get my head round this stuff a bit better (a lot better hopefully but I shouldn’t get too presumptious :p ).
Guys i understand the frustration that some of you are voicing here. No standards are making things harder for designers to come up with attractive emails that follow the clients’ brand as closely as it needs to be to maintain that consistency.
But
I have been in this industry for more than 6 years and we are one of the pioneering companies in our market. Whilst it is frustrating, the lack of standrads has NEVER affected us our our clients in any real way.
Why?
Because we employ EMAIL designers. NOT WEB designers.
We know what the lowest common design denominator is and we code to that. So do we have the odd problem here and there with specific email clients. Yes. But there is ALWAYS a workaround.
Spacer gifs, tables etc. Sometimes people forget that old-school coding still works! So use it!
Maybe it’s cause we’re more client focussed, maybe it’s cause we’re more tolerant or maybe it’s cause we can adapt quicker but we don’t really find it all that big a problem that our beloved ‘float’ tag doesn’t work or that our positioning of that image using CSS isn’t working. Why? Cause there’s other ways of getting it to work!
Now i’m not trying to offend anyone by calling them lazy, but sometimes we get a little too hung up on getting others to find solutions to our problems rather than us finding our own.
Its funny how we see things different, for the moment the email newsletter creations.
I do not have a problem creating email newsletters for any email client. The solution is to write all css inline within the code direct attached to the styled header, paragraph or any div or component one need to style.
With my experience this is the only way to make it working in Gmail, yahoo mail and hotmail, it also apply to Mac Entourage, Thunderbird, Outlook and alot of other software options…
@email marketer:
I can just about see where you’re coming from, but I have to say that I think you’re entirely wrong.
Lets look at web design and email design as two parallel items and do some comparison.
Web Design:
Right now I suffer as a result of the length of time it took for web standards to become universally accepted. Coding and styling for the web pre standards was a nightmare, and, thanks to IE6 still being used by a high percentage of people, it still is. Every web site I create inevitably necessitates an additional 5-15 percent development time to ensure that it displays correctly in IE6 and IE7.
I don’t have to worry about Firefox, Safari, Opera, as they’re on the ball. IE8 is going to be fully standards compliant, and I’m looking forward to the day that IE6 usage drops to such a low percentage that we can justify dropping support for it.
Email Design:
First up, there should be no reason why email design, from a coding and styling perspective, should be any different to web design.
Secondly, you laud “Spacer gifs, tables etc.”, and perhaps you neglect to consider that standards will not just assist designers, but also improve accessibility. There’s a reason tables shouldn’t be used for structure in HTML (web or mail) - tables are strictly there to enable the display of tabular data. A screen reader will disect information in a table in a very specific way, one that is not conducive to semantic dissemination of information!
Furthermore, whether you employ email designers or web designers, remember that the acceptance of standards across the board will help everyone - email designers will have an easier time of it, without needing to worry about whether it’s going to look right in Live Mail, or Outlook, or Gmail.
Don’t forget, the instigators of this push for standards are email designers, not a bunch of lazy web designers who want other people to solve a problem for them. It’s about common sense, and, to me, standards make an awful lot of common sense.
:)
Alex
Outlook 2007 is much more troublesome than gmail- disabled bg images, animations, troublesome spaces when using spacers under 25px, etc.
Our team doesn’t have any problems with Gmail at all.
@email marketer
“Sometimes people forget that old-school coding still works! So use it! “
Nobody is forgetting that it works, but sticking with something that is frankly pretty crappy, just because it works, is not the best approach.
We are trying to improve the situation for everyone. If web designers were still stuck using old school layout techniques, we would not have the web sites and web applications we can built today.
Why should email be left behind?
Wow… Loved the idea, is this project still open?
I have checked the Flickr Group and there is some nice photos, anyway i will upload mine as well… hopefully i can help a little bit, thanks.
I really love it.
“Sometimes people forget that old-school coding still works! So use it! “
Nobody is forgetting that it works, but sticking with something that is frankly pretty crappy, just because it works, is not the best approach.
“Sometimes people forget that old-school coding still works! So use it! “
Yeah what a ridiculous comment. The point of the web standards movement is to make developers lives easier by not having to rely on antiquated hacks in order to create a consistent display.
Steam engines still work too!
Outlook 2007 is much more troublesome than gmail- disabled bg images, animations, troublesome spaces when using spacers under 25px, etc.
Good call! I’ll have mine up soon-ish
I have checked the Flickr Group and there is some nice photos, anyway i will upload mine as well… hopefully i can help a little bit, thanks.
I think this is fantastic and have used Yahoo for years
Outlook 2007 is much more troublesome than gmail- disabled bg images, animations, troublesome spaces when using spacers under 25px, etc.
Our team doesn’t have any problems with Gmail at all.
Good call! I’ll have mine up soon-ish.
Steam engines still work too!
I’m curious about the result
Good call
This is totally great idea
thank you
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The subject of a very wonderful and distinct
I thank you for continuing excellence
Thank you
There are 21 photos just right now. I think I will send mine’s.
Good call! I’ll have mine up soon-ish ,,,
I have never used gmail, it seems whenever i get an email from a gmail account, the writer is always smug. I have never had a need for gmail, and hopefully will never!
thank you
very goooooood
very nic
nice,Thank you_
very thanks.
super topic congrulataion
I just love your idea that is a good idea for me
I have just checked the Flicker account. There are allready a lot of nice (and some ugly) photos… Do you have enough photos to create the video, in your attempt to ‘attract some attention from the right people at Google’? Thanks, Steven
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This is totally great idea. There are 21 photos just right now. I think I will send mine’s.
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Try telling my clients that! I expect the same functionality as a browser simply because the companies that I have worked for have come to expect simple behaviour. If I now turn around and say “background images in e-mail are for kiddies and spammers” they will tell me shut up and do it.
Yeah what a ridiculous comment. The point of the web standards movement is to make developers lives easier by not having to rely on antiquated hacks in order to create a consistent display.
I have just checked the Flicker account. There are allready a lot of nice (and some ugly) photos… Do you have enough photos to create the video, in your attempt to ‘attract some attention from the right people at Google’? Thanks, Steven
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Yeah ^) what a ridiculous comment. The point of the web standards movement is to make developers lives easier by not having to rely on antiquated hacks in order to create a consistent display.