Many of us have been there before: you spend hours carefully crafting your email, including all the CSS and images you need to convey your message in an artful and eye-catching way, and when you receive it in Outlook 2007 or Gmail the email is stripped down to almost text-only content. Every email program renders your email differently due to inconsistent web standards, causing major frustration when coding emails. A new organization is out to change that.

The Email Standards Project aims to open the lines of communication between email client developers and designers to help improve web standards support for designers and accessibility for readers. The site includes a bevy of information on the differences between email clients, including the web standards used by each and examples of test renderings. The biggest offenders (needing improvement) are:

Apple .Mac
Google Gmail
Lotus Notes 8
Microsoft Outlook 2007
Windows Live Hotmail

The ultimate goal of the project is to educate designers in hopes of getting them involved, and to provide feedback to the email client developers to help make the changes. This is not only a very exciting step in the right direction for email marketing, but it’s also an opportunity for email designers to learn more about best practices in designing emails for accessibility by all.

To read more about the project or to get involved, click here.