Andy shared a link yesterday to the newly launched Email standards initiative. We often get requests to build HTML emails for our clients and if you thought supporting a broad base of browsers was a challenge, try getting proper alignments in Lotus Notes. Writing HTML for email is like stepping back into the 20th century. For far too long this has been a snarly mess with very little recourse for the developer. The cryptic hurdles of spam filtering complicate things even further as suddenly the balance of images versus text have to be factored in to whether you land in the inbox or the junk pile. We are fans of Campaign Monitor who is spearheading this initiative. We use them to distribute our own newsletter. Here’s hoping that the good word spreads wide and puts appropriate pressure on those lagging email clients to step up and give us a workable way to provide a rich email experience without all the unnecessary grief.