Email Markup Consortium
Whether you've been in email for a few months, or years, we are all on the same page that one email client (or many, depending) can completely obliterate an email while it remains beautifully built & designed for others.
Why is it that custom fonts work in some client inboxes, yet we're confined to 6 web-safe fonts on others?
Why do we, as marketers, designers, and developers have to use HTML when building emails as if it's an intricate puzzle?
There's a community of 10,000+ email marketers that actively collaborate on ways to hack certain aspects of email when we're in a bind.
Because email lacks standardization. Our community is full of tools that have emerged because of this, such as Parcel, Can I Email, and Email on Acid, just to name a few.
We are trying our best to work with web development tools, in a completely different environment than the web itself. We require these tools to tell us that a GIF doesn't render in Outlook, or that no, you can't embed video on many other clients, and wow - Gmail App is going to increase your font size automatically if it's less than 12px.
Parcel is excited to be an early member of the Email Markup Consortium. Led by Hussein Al Hammad, Mark Robbins, and Alice Li, this project aims at working with developers, the email tools we use in our tech stacks, and the email clients that often cause us headaches, to implement standardization so that we can create more accessible reliable emails. And overall, have a better user experience while doing it.
Become a member, or join the discussion on GitHub and collectively we can work towards making our jobs more enjoyable, and our emails better for the inboxes they are viewed in!
Happy sending!
Avi Goldman
Founder