I've been using Campaign Monitor for a long time and I've just started working with them to improve the Drupal module I wrote a few months ago.
David Greiner and everybody at Campaign Monitor are doing a great job, specially promoting the use of web standards for email, and that's why I'm writing this article. We, professional web developers, must work to get email client vendors to fully support standard HTML and CSS in their products.
At 456 Berea St. Roger Johansson has already made the same call and I totally agree with him.
So, what you're waiting for? You can start by helping to define a baseline to support web standards in email.
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Waiting?
The best way to support HTML email is to identify an HTML-body attachment and delete it on the server before it ever gets to my inbox. HTML email is a blight upon the Internet and must be destroyed.
You start from the wrong point
You presume we need HTML mail. I disagree.
I, as a user, prefer plain text email too
But when some client or project requires to send a newsletter or simply a nicely designed report via email, HTML is, in most cases, what they want.
I know a better solution would be sending just a link and show everything as a web page, and I always suggest that to clients, but unfortunately not everybody wants to go that way. After all, if all clients and users would listen to web developers we wouldn't see so many people browsing with Internet Explorer.
The idea of standards, even for a medium that not many web developers like, is a good one. It's simply silly having to create as many different versions of one HTML email as clients exist.
Alexis Bellido