Gmail Appeal Update - We have contact!
Only a few days after the release of our 2008 Gmail Appeal video, we have had some success!
Although in the initial launch of the Email Standards Project we did not hear from Google at all, last week we heard from a Google Engineer who (although we can't currently publish his name and details) is in a great position to investigate and perhaps make some improvements.
Thanks to the excellent 20% time offered to Google staff, a passionate engineer who has seen our video is going to use his time to explore what the situation is regarding Gmail's rendering, and how it might be improved.
Although 20% of one person's time might seem a small amount, it is a huge win that we have made contact with someone who has the right contacts and skills, and is willing to talk to us. Thanks go to everybody who took part in Project Gmail Grimace, and everyone who has promoted the Email Standards Project in any way.
We're really excited about this, and looking forward to some progress at some point in the future. Please leave a comment thanking our Google friend below!
Wicked! Big ups to the Googler for stepping up and to all those involved in your project for getting some notice!
Awesome! Much thanks to the Googler for donating his time and to you guys for standing up for all us poor souls who have to code up HTML emails. Wind beneath my wings and all that :D
Thank you Anonymous Googler, you are appreciated.
Anonymous googler is my hero of the day.
That’s great news! Thanks to the Googler who’ll be looking into this.
So what’s next - MS?
It looks like the best route to go is to speak in a language the recipient will understand. In the case of Google, they understood a smart video, modelled on their own Gmail video offerings.
So, what do MS understand?
Well, if we look at their approach with IE and the upcoming IE8, which finally supports standards, then we might see a clue as to what they understand.
I wrote about their reasons for supporting web standards in more detail here, and it occurs to me that there are two routes to go.
1. Appeal to their developers throwing weight into mention of their new “Interoperability Principles”.
2. Go to the European court, like Opera did, and state that “Microsoft’s unilateral control over standards in some markets creates a de facto standard that is more costly to support, harder to maintain, and technologically inferior and that can even expose users to security risks”, or something along those lines.
;)
There’s been a lot of talk about this form of anti-trust stuff when it comes to the web browser, but I don’t think I’ve heard so much when it comes to email clients.
While Outlook Express/Windows Mail is bundled with Windows, obviously Outlook 2007 is in it’s own little world. A client pays for the pleasure of Outlook 2007.
Windows Mail (I assume this is the mail client bundled with Vista) is doing great, so no need to worry there.
I’m not sure I have any answers as to the best approach, but I definitely think we need to speak in a language they understand, and from the looks of things, MS understand things when dollars are at risk.
Maybe we should kidnap a copy of MS Outlook 2007 and hold it for ransom!
ps. Is Outlook Express just being written off?
A big thanks to the Google engineer and to the ESP and assorted grimaces for making it happen.
Cheers Google God
Go Google dude!
Great News! Nice one Guys ! and big tanks to the Gmail Guru ;)
WooHoo!!! Great work all. Mayhaps this will be the start of something big.
Not sure if this is really the place to be mentioning this, but in reference to my comment above, I’ve written an article about the next step, and will be spreading that around a bit.
Thx to the googler and thx to you too !
Fantastic! I’m so glad to hear it. Good work, folks!
{ryan}
Thats great news. Keep us posted with any further updates
Hats off to the ESP team! Way to stick with it and be persistent in seeking out contacts who can address the issues you all have brought to light. Kudos the the Google contacts for sitting up and taking notice, but even more kudos to those other ESPs who have already stepped up to the plate to support a standard of some sort.
Here’s to making our coding futures much easier!
Jared
Great! Now please do a good job anonymous googler, we will help you :)
Thanks google, gives yourself a pat on the back!
Cool. I love gmail and only wish that it would support email standards. I hope they can make it work.
Great thanks, Google guy!
Great News! Nice one Guys,and big tanks to the Gmail Guru ;)
Thanks, Google person! That’s good news.
Any update on how our friendly Googler is spending his 20%?
I sent our weekly newsletter using only CSS styles in the head element and the result was very predictable. I have heard back from members about how it looked and emailed them back to check out email standards project. I also fired off a message to them at: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=suggest
Gmail just ran into a whole host of problems recently with a 2 hour downtime. Hopefully they can address issues like this as quick as they contacted you. Great job with the video and support from the website in shaking some leaves.
That two hour down time hit right as I was setting up a google apps account for one of my websites. I thought something major had happened and would never be fixed. Fortunately, I was wrong. Maybe, there is hope for them? They have so many nice features it would be great if it overflowed into how they treat email!
Awesome. This 80-20 time policy by Google really leads to interesting developments!
1 Trackback
Why HTML email is soooo 20th century - Don't get me wrong, I believe in HTML email. Email marketing is a big part of my livelihood. But sometimes I despair of ever finding someone who can quickly, easily and happily create HTML emails that render in the majority