Is it time for a Gmail intervention?
When Gmail first launched, and people were selling invitations for it on Ebay, it was easy to see why. A vastly faster and more efficient interface coupled with huge storage made for a really significant step in email via the web.
Web designers and tech heads loved it, and in fact all of our Email Standards Project email is accessed via Gmail. However, in one area Gmail has always lagged behind a little — rendering of CSS in HTML email. Whereas almost every other email client will render (with varying degrees of success) CSS from the head of an HTML document, Gmail strips it out completely.
It’s a confusing situation, because it’s not like you can’t use CSS at all in Gmail, you just have to code it inline. When you do, support is reasonably good, at least for the basics. Without going through the hassle of inline styles, you end up with what you see in our Gmail report, an unstyled page. Sure it degrades well, but it seems an odd distinction to make.
It’s not just us here at ESP that think so. Since the Email Standards Project launched, the Gmail report has been (after the homepage) by far the most popular page on the site. A lot of people are confused about how to get their emails showing up properly in Gmail.
We know that somewhere out there, somebody who has visited this site knows the right person from the Gmail team who can help us to understand why Gmail works the way it does. We have no doubt that it was done for a reason, probably a great, sensible, defensible reason.
All we want to do is start that conversation, to see if there is a way we can help the Gmail team improve the support for web standards without compromising their other requirements. So if you know somebody who could help, or somebody who might know that person - get in touch! We’ll either end up contacting the right person, or Kevin Bacon, so it’s win-win!
Even if you don’t know anyone, you can help the cause by commenting on this Google group asking Google to consider adding better support for CSS and HTML standards, because every voice counts.
Of course, if you are someone from the Gmail team, then we’d love to hear from you directly, because we really are here to be as helpful as possible. Gmail is great, but a Gmail that supported web standards would be even better.
It’s utter madness. It’s such a wonderful webmail tool (despite crashing in firefox daily) and is so intelligent in the ways it manages my email.
Yet 9 out of 10 html emails dont display as they designers intended - yet when I download them into thunderbird, 9 out of 10 do display!
Come on google - sort it out!
Yes! Please please please lay on Google to get GMail to support CSS. That’s been my only gripe the entire time I’ve used it.
My life has been so much easier since I moved my email over to Gmail. I like the way it integrates with so many other applications and the new free Imap works great with my iPhone. It would however be greatly appreciated if Google would at least look into the issues surrounding CSS support. A company with such a large web presence should in my mind be pushing web standards.
This might be good in:
http://www.google.com/mail/help/yourstory.html
I’m sure many in this community have one. Just need some mad video skills along with those email coding skills.
That’s a good suggestion Sharon. I’d also encourage everyone to “Suggest” that Gmail support web standards using their feature suggestion form:
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=suggest
Yes, getting google to support standards would be a great feather in the groups cap. It could be used to pressure other vendors who are always trying to play catch-up to Goog.
Or maybe that’s another way to sell it: Yahoo, support standards before Google does.
If there’s one webmail client I really expected to be up on standards, it would be Gmail. Sadly, it’s become just as much a thorn in my side when it comes to e-mail newsletter design as Windows Live Mail.
C’mon Google, get with it!
It is very odd that Gmail isn’t up to snuff on supporting CSS in Email. It’s as though they’ve built this high-end, advanced movie theater with all the latest bells and whistles - but when you come in to watch a movie, you find that they don’t display in color, or the stereo sound has been switched to mono or something. The sad thing is that there are countless numbers of regular people out there using gmail who are receiving Email on a daily basis - and there looking at it and thinking, ‘what a lame Email’, because it is not rendered as the author intended it. It would be very interesting if there was some way to quantify the impact that Google has on e-sales on a regular basis due to their decision to not support CSS or other formatting capabilities within Gmail.
I agree with this post. Gmail was supposed to revolutionalize email, and they did for reading it, but sending email is still a sore spot. Please work with us here and support emails that look good!
The best reason a clever friend of mine could come up with for stripping that CSS and the id and class names was to avoid possible conflicts/exploits with their own naming schemes with respect to the client’s Javascript. If they do things like getElementById(), a clever or innocent email writer could intentionally or accidentally take over the interface Javascript.
That said, the Gmail programmers are incredibly intelligent and gifted, and I’m sure that if they hear that this affects their users in a detrimental way the Gmail team can figure out something that will work.
[ryan]
That’s a good call Ryan, but the Yahoo and AOL teams already get around that conflict with their webmail client, so it’s certainly not a technical impossibility.
I’m actually not that surprised.
google.ca doesn’t validate (http://validator.w3.org), nor do many of their pages. And lots of them use ugly (in terms of markup, not design) table-based layouts.
So, if they don’t care about web standards in these other areas, why would they care about them in Gmail?
Dave, I wholeheartedly agree with you. It oughtn’t be too difficult to restrict the Javascript to not search within the message, especially given the enormous brains of the Gmail team.
And like I said, it’s affecting their users, so it really should be done.
Utterly preposterous that Google would fail to recognize they have made mistakes and correct them.
Our company has recently switched to Google Apps & I must say it has been a tough transition process. The only saving grace is that they are Google and they will make it all work. Right?
Get it together Google and right the wrong.
Google has great ideas, easy to use apps, and is all in all just fun.
I hope they rise to the top of this problem too.
As much as I would love for Gmail to support web standards (I generally support anything that makes my life simpler), I must play the devil’s advocate role here in defense of Google. Has anyone stopped to think about the reasons why Gmail uses such aggressive filtering techniques? And that maybe this contributes to the marvelous spam filtering the Gmail can offer its users.
It’s important to remember the email is not the web. It is a COMPLETELY different environment fundamentally and therefore, web standards can never apply directly to the email world (at least not anytime in the near future).
The problem comes from the disparity in technological implementation of usability for web vs. email. The web is largely viewed in web browsers...thats it. There are other web usability variants like WML and .mobi for mobile devices, but the majority of the web is viewed in browsers. There are variations in browser implementations (which is where standards come in) but the basic platform is the same.
Email is very different, significantly far behind the web in evolutionary development and significantly more complex. The technologies that effect email usability are much more numerous in comparison including POP, IMAP, MAPI, web-based, SMS, and all of these technologies are further complicated by their respective differences in implementation (web-based mail is effected by individual browsers, POP clients are effected by individual application versions, SMS is effected by individual mobile devices or web browsers, etc.).
On top of the complex technology base, since the first computers started talking with one another, spam has plagued the email world. Spam is a huge problem in email, much more pronounced than on the web, and is constantly adapting to overcome filtering techniques...its an all out war.
Gmail has sided with its users, not with developers, and though that makes my job all the more difficult, its a sacrifice I’m willing to accept because I too care more about my users than some overly-elaborate, ostentatious layout that’s obviously meant for a web browser.
As email standards continue to evolve, its shallow-minded to assume that what works for the web will naturally bleed over into the email world. I, just like all email developers, pray for the day when some set of core standards allows the email platform to evolve past its current state, but I’m simply not convinced that moving in the direction of web standards is a viable, long-term solution and apparently, neither is Google.
Ross, you raise some good points. However, aren’t the majority of the people utilizing Gmail also utilizing a browser? For those reading their Email in other clients (I use mutt on a regular basis for some accounts), there are perfectly good means to allow the sender the ability to relay their message in plain text format, so everyone’s happy.
For those who are utilizing a browser to view their Email, or some other Email client capable of displaying HTML markup, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the content to render consistently with standards that are out there. I could read a plain text document and understand the content, but a document formatted with bullet points and headings and an occasional image enhances readability.
Keep in mind that ESP is not asking for full compliance with existing standards - just a specific subset (http://www.email-standards.org/acid-test/), to allow coders some degree of confidence that a well designed message will display consistently to their readers.
Spam is certainly a concern, but I don’t think that limiting capabilities is the answer.
The goal of this project is to open a dialog with the various providers - and learn what concerns they have and how we can address those while simultaneously improving readability and consistency through applied standards.
I believe it is a great project and agree that the time has come for standards to be addressed. If Google has issue with the standards proposed, let’s here about which ones and why - if they’re valid, then I’m sure the standard will evolve to reflect that. However, other providers are able to support the standards proposed (http://www.email-standards.org/clients/), so why wouldn’t Google be able to?
Google showed us a lot of cleverness in their offer. It is well enough to be adopted by medium sized organizations as their main e-mail (and calendaring) environment. I am sure they can do it when they put their mind to it. To be honest I was actually surprised they didn’t yet.
Hey guys,
Matt Cutts (Google’s head spam guy) was posting on standards and that he wished they were more (erm) standard, so I put in a request to talk to the Gmail team with a link back to this site (been using it a lot myself recently). He replied saying
“Sam I Am, if I run into any Gmail people, I’ll mention it.”.
Hope that helps; it does need improvement!
Sam
Gmail should embrace these standards whole-heartedly. Follow Yahoo just this once…
gmail is big zone for every body.( Over 6384.732565 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message.--gmail slogan---) So every body think best mail server for gmail.But i don’t use gmail.Because it’s not neccessary for me.So i use hotmail.
I’ve never had a problem with Gmail.... Hotmail yes, Outlook 2007 very yes *cries*, but not Gmail. Or very minor problems with Gmail.
Outlook 2007 and Hotmail are much, much worse.
I love Gmail and use it daily. Never had a problem.
gmail is every time is best mail services. because that’s very fast and usuful.
i use hotmail only for msn.
“When Gmail first launched, and people were selling invitations for it on Ebay,” haha. i remembered it. it’s comic.
CSS allows us to email pages on our site tha twe want to look one way on the site and another way in an email. Why is Google creating an unneeded headache in accomplishing what works well pretty much everywhere else?
Without commentaries Gmail best and no rival
delete spam no 26 please!
27 - spam))) No? - yes, yes
Yes, Google does have it’s issues with CSS. I’ve been using Yahoo for years and they don’t seem to have any issues at all. Hopefully they’ll get it figured out here eventually as I do think it’s the better web client overall.
for ever gmail.it’s wonderfull performans.
I love Google and specially Gmail :) i use it on daily basis… GMail Rocks
Gmail is not just worthless junk, it is a liability, due to it’s inability to proper render CSS, and thus completely mutilating 9 out of 10 newsletter-style emails. Until Google cleans up their act and gets rid of those Microsoft developers, stay away. Use Yahoo! They have the best web based email product today, (hopefully MS won’t get their hands on them.) Even their interface is leaps and bounds above Gmail’s, like the ability to open messages in tabs.
Daniel Odulo
Database Applications Developer
http://www.Odulo.com/Consulting/
In Turkey , gmail is very populer and here gmail is faster than others.
For me hotmail is only for messenger.I use gmail for 2 uears and no problem so far.
good topic. thax
I have thought of switching to gmail, simply because i cant het hotmail to work on my ipod!
Do you have an offitial reaction of Gmail team or Google according supporting of the web standards in Gmail?
Your site has very much liked me. I really appreciate it!
gmail bad design…
I love Google and specially Gmail :) i use it on daily basis…
Will be good to have Google among companies, supporting web-standards for e-mail.