DEV Community: Email Markup Consortium

The new Outlook for Windows

Hussein Al Hammad — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 17:00:29 +0000

On 17 May 2022, Microsoft announced the new Outlook for Windows, a version that will have a huge positive impact in the email space.

Now

For years, the Outlook for Windows desktop apps relied on proprietary technology to render HTML emails: their own Microsoft Word. The historic and business reasons behind that decision is not the topic of today, but its impact is.

Besides proprietary features that only work on Outlook for Windows, the rendering of HTML and CSS features is not always identical to the W3C specification. The Microsoft Word rendering engine had not kept up with the HTML’s living standard.

The result? Given the wide use of Outlook for Windows globally, email developers stuck with patterns only needed to ensure their HTML emails render well on Outlook for Windows. Because these patterns are not needed for emails to render well elsewhere, it’s an Outlook-first approach and not a user-first one.

The new Outlook for Windows

The new Outlook for Windows brings a fundamental change. It no longer uses Microsoft Word as a rendering engine, but a normal web browser engine.

Based on the initial testing of developers in the email community, it is reported to have an almost identical handling of HTML/CSS features to the web version of Outlook. This aligns with Microsoft’s goal to “bring consistency across our Windows and web codebases”.

It has been a multi-year effort to reach this point, and Microsoft has been betting on web technologies when developing new features for their Outlook apps across all operating systems for some time now. Finally, it’s now time for the HTML rendering to catch up with the rest of the app.

Availability

At the time of the announcement:

The new Outlook for Windows is available to Beta Channel users running Version 2205 (Build 15225.20000) or later.

However, it seems Microsoft is making the new version more accessible to more users as it can be downloaded and installed via its Windows App store.

The path forward

“Code like it’s the 90s” - an eternal joke that is reaching its expiry date. October 2026 is the month when Microsoft is ending support to the last version of Outlook that uses the Microsoft Word rendering engine. We can anticipate users to start using the new Outlook for Windows well before that date.

The step Microsoft is taking here makes the goal of enforcing some email standards more feasible. One of the key reasons we started the Email Markup Consortium last year was we believed the timing is right. This is a huge milestone in the email industry and we believe it is going to help us realize our vision.

电子邮件标记联盟简介 (EMC)

Hussein Al Hammad — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 08:41:22 +0000

This post was originally published in English. Translated by Muxiang Pajerski.

电子邮件标记联盟是什么？

电子邮件标记联盟 (EMC) 是一个由电子邮件行业内专业人士领导与组织的非营利社区组织，它致力于改善每个人的电子邮件使用与应用的体验。

发件人、收件人和电子邮件客户端的共同目标是改善用户体验，并最大程度的优化可达性、功能性、一致性和可靠性。然而，目前致力于达到这些共同目标的电子邮件行业内各环节缺乏合作，导致电子邮件最终在各个电子邮件客户端的结果不一致。

收件人应该能够轻松访问他们收到的每封电子邮件的内容，无论他们的设备、电子邮件客户端、辅助技术或互联网速度如何。结合创建与发送电子邮件的工具，电邮标记联盟 (EMC) 与电子邮件程序开发人员及电子邮件各客户端一起合作，将在电子邮件旅程的每一步推动这一愿景。

为什么需要这个联盟？

综上所述，电子邮件业内相关各方缺乏合作来达到实现这些共同目标的愿望。

EMC 并不是第一个尝试解决这个问题的组织和项目。过去也有一些组织和个人在这方面做出过一些努力，其中包括：

以上证明，相关各方的合作确实存在差距，电子邮件行业需要 EMC 这样的组织与项目来引导相关各方聚集一团，整合资源和力量一起合作达到我们的共同目标。

为什么EMC与以前的项目不同？

以前的项目得到过很好的支持，并对推动这个共同目标的进展有所帮助，但是，它们中的大多数目前已经停止了运作。

长久性

EMC 的目标之一是长久性。我们计划在运作 EMC当中，在现任各项目的负责人员离开时，该项目仍然能持续进行下去并得到有效的支持。为了实现这一点，我们把这个项目尽可能的开放给大众。所有的工作进程与资源都公开地发布在 GitHub 上，任何人都可以为这个项目贡献他们的专业知识和力量。

我们还在研究考虑一个长期性解决方案来应对电子邮件标记的持续性与新技术可能带来的新挑战。我们不希望只是短暂性地解决几个小问题，相反，我们致力于电子邮件的标准化与规范化并希望在未来的电子邮件领域里能持续保持这些标准与规范。

最佳时机

我们认为与之前的尝试相比，我们这个项目的时机更好。近年来，电子邮件社区大规模发展，各方协作也大大增加。由业内社区志愿者专业人员为社区推出的相关新项目不断涌现，例如庞大的 EmailGeeks（电子邮件极客） Slack 组、电子邮件专业女性社团、CanIEmail（我能邮件吗）、如何针对电子邮件客户端等等。

有效合作的根据

近年来的电子邮件客户端在 AMP for Email 等项目上协作并采用 BIMI 等标准证明了在电子邮件领域中相互竞争的各个供应商是可以一起合作的。

志愿者如何参与？

该项目是开源项目，你可以在 GitHub 上找到我们，任何人都可以贡献一份力量：

您可以即刻加入并参与现有的讨论
通过打开 PR 直接参与贡献
像任何开源项目中一样，你可以开始一个问题讨论

如果您想正式表示对项目的支持，您可以以个人或组织的身份申请成为 EMC 支持者。

如果您想更多地参与 EMC 项目和组织的发展，您可以个人或组织的身份申请成为 EMC 成员。

如果您代表一个组织机构并且想要赞助 EMC，请与我们联系。

EMC 管理员
马克·罗宾斯、侯赛因·阿尔·哈马德、爱丽丝·李

Collecting data

Mark Robbins — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 17:10:01 +0000

A number of projects we are working on require us to analyze real emails being sent on an on-going basis. We could not find a single data source that meets our criteria. That’s why we have recently started a new project to collect email data with the help of our good friends and sponsors at Parcel.

We are now in the process of collecting emails from as wide a range of industries, countries and languages as possible. We have already collected more than 10,000 emails from over 840 unique root domains. We intend to continue collecting more as this data will help us in providing real insights on a regular basis. This is where our other projects can take advantage of this data.

Data Diversity

A lot of data we see used in email reports is often skewed to a western audience. Collecting emails from the west alone is not going to give us the full picture of the real state of HTML emails. That's why we are making an effort to diversify our data.

Sender tools play a big role in the final HTML code sent to end users. We realize different sender tools are used in different industries and in different areas around the world. This could be by choice, or due to availability.

In addition, coding practices and what is considered important could vary in different parts of the world. For example, while there has been a big push for accessibility in the west in recent years, this may not be considered important everywhere. We cannot make many assumptions at this stage, but we should have a better understanding soon as we move closer to the analysis stage.

Our Accessibility Report Project

We're running this project alongside the team at Parcel.

The goal of the Accessibility Report project is to provide us with insight into the current state of email accessibility. We aim to track changes over time to see how it progresses, similar to the WebAIM Million report for websites.

Join the accessibility report discussion

The Email Platform Status project

We are working on this project alongside EMC member Rémi Parmentier and his team at Tilt Studio. The Email Platform Status project is an existent project that EMC is contributing to.

The Email Platform Status project evaluates HTML emails and calculates the use of HTML/CSS features within these emails. This will help answer questions on what coding techniques people are using? At what rate is modern code being adopted? And looking at how the industry is changing over time.

Join the email platform status discussion

Other Projects

We may use the same data source in other projects as well. If you have an idea on how we can utilize this data further, please get in touch.

How can you help?

Our main priority with this project at the moment is gathering data. We need as wide a range of emails as possible. So please, add this email address to your email lists along with any other lists you can think of. We want as many languages as possible and as many industries, both big and small.

Field	Value
Email address	collect@collect.emailmarkup.org
Name	Email Markup
Birthday	January 1, 2000
Address	1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500

Introducing the Email Markup Consortium (EMC)

Hussein Al Hammad — Wed, 25 May 2022 08:06:19 +0000

What is the Email Markup Consortium?

The Email Markup Consortium (EMC) is a community-led group of industry professionals working to improve the email experience for everyone.

Senders, recipients, and email clients share the common goals of improving user experience, accessibility, performance, consistency, and reliability. However, currently there is a lack of cooperation in trying to achieve these goals leading to inconsistent results.

Recipients should be able to easily access the content of every email sent to them, regardless of their device, email client, assistive technology or internet speed. The EMC collaborates with developers, creation and sending tools, and email clients to drive this vision forward at every step of the email journey.

Why is this needed?

As stated above, there is a lack of cooperation between the relevant parties to work towards these shared goals.

EMC is not the first project to attempt to address this. There have been several efforts in the past including:

This highlights to us that there is indeed a gap and an on-going need for a project like EMC to help bring the relevant parties together and collaboratively work with them.

Why is this different to previous projects?

Previous projects gained good support and helped move things forward. However, most of them have now been shut down or just left mostly unused.

Longevity

One of the goals of the EMC is longevity. We are structuring the EMC so that when the current members have moved on, the project will still live and be supported. To achieve this, we’re making the project as open as possible. Everything is posted publicly on GitHub where anyone can contribute.

We’re also thinking about long term solutions for the continuing challenges of email markup as well as new challenges that may arise with new technology. We’re not looking to only fix a few bugs. Instead, we’re looking to develop standards and maintain those standards moving forward.

Timing

We think the timing of this project is better in comparison to previous attempts. In recent years the email community has grown massively and collaboration has hugely increased. There are new projects coming up all the time, built by the community for the community, such as the huge EmailGeeks Slack group, Women of email, CanIEmail, How to Target Email Clients, and many more.

Evidence of productive collaboration

Seeing 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.

How can people get involved?

The project is open source and you can find us on GitHub where anyone can contribute:

You can start or join an existing discussion
Contribute directly by opening a PR
Open an issue like you would on any open source project

If you would like to publicly show your support for the project, you can apply to become an EMC supporter as an individual or an organisation.

If you would like to be more involved in EMC projects and the organisation’s direction, you can apply to become an EMC member as an individual or an organisation.

If you represent an organisation and you would like to sponsor EMC, please get in touch.

EMC Administrators
Mark Robbins, Hussein Al Hammad, Alice Li