Comes the desperately overdue project for some kind of synoptic understanding of standards in e-mail.

Sweet mercy, is that an oasis?

Here's the introductory blog post:

[W]hy is it so hard to build a decent HTML email? The answer was not that nobody really cared, it was that the people who cared weren’t in a position to make any difference, or were not getting any support.

That’s what the Email Standards Project is about: Making sure that people do care, that they do see why having standards support for email clients is important. And about making sure that our voices are heard by the people who can make a difference, the email client developers.

This is not about complaining or being unrealistic. It’s about making contact with the right people, and getting them all the support they can use to improve their email clients. We want to work with the design community and the email clients to set some goals for email standards so that we can aim at a future when HTML email is not so hard.

Talk about Thanksgiving.

There may be a few leftovers to feed the blog, but DIA is closed for Thanksgiving Thursday and Friday. We'll catch you next week for the homestretch.

As we've mentioned before getting email design from the interface to your member's inbox is not as simple as one might hope. Luckily, a well designed email template can not only help you deliver an email that more closely resembles your vision, but can also lead to consistency between emails and speed up the time each blast takes to create.

Use a Template

The over whelming majority of users need to use an email template. We want to use a template to 'protect' some parts of our HTML for both consistency and to ensure critical parts of the HTML are not altered during the creation of a blast.

In the world of email delivery, your IP address reputation is what it's all about. In days past, all you had to do was ensure that the emails going out of your system were clean, and the spam filters would pass them through into inboxes. Now, Internet Service Providers keep volumes of data on your IP addresses and what kind of email you send through them. They also keep data on frequency, volume, bounce count, and spam complaints.

In order to optimize email deliverability, one must not only ensure that emails have non-spam-like content, but also that one keeps bounce counts and complaints low: if your IP drops e-mail to 10,000 bogus Yahoo addresses, Yahoo's going to assume the other 10,000 good addresses are receiving junk and handle it accordingly. Our member organizations control the first part of that equation, and (by being ethical mailers and not uploading spam lists) a portion of the second.

But a very big part of keeping bounce counts and spam complaints within ISPs' operational limits happens out of DIA's shop through processes to automatically unsubscribe addresses that have gone sour.

A recent conversation about the vagaries of HTML e-mail on the Progressive Exchange mailing list prompted some good conversation about a perennially vexing topic: how do you keep your hard-won html design rendering properly in your recipients' mailboxes?

Short answer: you probably don't.

For coders who like to get into it, I've been in the habit of recommending the exhaustive sleuthing done by sorta-competitor Campaign Monitor (for instance), which blogs the bejeezus out of the issue and has great resources like 30 free design-compliant templates that might shortcut the process.

The thumbnail version for the rest of us is that there's no orthodoxy. Like 4th century heretics, every e-mail provider has its own slightly different standard which on pain of hellfire and junk filtering is incompatible with every other provider's standard.

What's a small organization without the luxury of coding line-by-line styles to do?

Email. Its a pretty basic thing. You want to say "Hey" to our friend and invite him over for the game. So, you fire up that streamlined AJAX-y web client and fire off an email. Your friend gets the email, he says he'll bring the chips and beverages if you'll supply the main course and the TV. He'll even bring a few of his friends and that will be great. You reply back to his reply and the event is set.

"What did we ever do without email?," you think. Then, the light bulb appears. "I'd bet we can apply this to what we do at work and I'd be a hero!", you say aloud.

Unfortunately, you have only seen the tip of the cold, cold monolithic iceberg that is email deliverability.

Training -- though sometimes stressful -- is one of the best parts of my job, largely because of what I get to learn from people with completely different outlooks who pose incisive questions I would never think to ask.

On the orientation-to-Salsa webinars we've been running for current clients, I got a great question the other day about running reports to help campaign managers identify possible mistyped e-mail addresses so that they could manually correct them in the headquarters while the relationship was still retrievable.

A perfect occasion for both our custom report builder and a forehead-smacking "why didn't I think of that?"

Ever get this message when you click on a link in an email?

Email Scam Alert

Thunderbird thinks this site is suspicious! It may be trying to impersonate the web page you want to visit. Are you sure you want to visit www.democracyinaction.org?

These warnings arise because of the links in a message, and frequently because of the tracking of the clicks for that message. Thunderbird (or Outlook, or whatever) is responding to how that link looks to it, and suspects something bad is going on. It's not, but there are a few things to be aware of when using Salsa, or any email system that tracks click rates for emails.

The New Organizing Institute's three-day boot camp wrapped with a lighthearted session from Zack Exley which in my Day 3 notes is distinguished by nothing but the text of his single powerpoint slide.

Zack ran a little confessional, goading attendees into owning up to e-activism sins both venal and cardinal, which elicited this priceless nugget whose author and origin we'll leave safely obscure...

The Progressive Exchange conversation about mailing frequency I mentioned last week got a longer writeup at Care2's Frogloop detailing the harmful effects of not communicating often enough. Too cold!

This morning, e-mail shop MailChimp reports on the inverse case of a client who pressed open rates from monthly to twice-monthly to twice-weekly and saw open rates drop by three-quarters, referencing another report of a commercial mailer who did better by doing less. Too hot!

Test, test, test. There's just no substitute for sampling every bowl of porridge to find out for yourself what's just right.