Author: Marcus Bointon

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The Email Standards Project

The Email Standards Project is a worthy effort to try to get email clients to handle HTML email in a consistent way. Many already do pretty well, but there are some big exceptions: Outlook 2007 (with its ancient Word rendering engine), GMail, .Mac, Hotmail and others. Many are opposed to the whole idea of HTML email, but often their resentment is based on the fact that historically email client support has been so bad that they’ve had very poor experiences. Worse is that some senders (not us!) send HTML-only messages, which is certainly something that will drive a Mutt user potty. Smartmessages supports sending in plain, html and mixed formats (settable by each individual subscriber), and we ensure that our users get a clean, reliable platform for delivering their creations, so we try to work around the deficiencies of things like MS Exchange.

Generally the poor support in big-name clients has led to a need to develop HTML for email for very much the lowest common denominator, which for the most part means no CSS (unless you’re prepared to tiptoe through the minefields of using it), no images, no scripts, no forms, no attachments. Too many designers think of email as being just like the web, but it’s not – the vast majority of web pages will simply not work as email. These days the only effective way of designing for email is to start out with classic HTML 4.0 with no CSS or images and make your message look good using only type, white space and colour, because this is probably all that 90% (yes, really that much) of your recipients are going to see. You can then sprinkle a few images in for enhancement, but you should have no text in images that is not shown as text. With the advent of Outlook 2007’s big step backwards, it’s no longer possible to use background images, so you can’t have text over images at all. You also can’t rely on alt attributes as image fallbacks, as some big clients don’t display the alt text if images are being suppressed as an anti-spam measure.

Many designers get very uppity about this kind of thing as it means that their palette of options is severely constrained, however, it should really be regarded as a challenge. It’s not too hard to make stuff look good with heavy use of images (see CSS Zen Garden for gorgeous examples), but producing stuff that looks good with no images or CSS (or more to the point to still look good when those parts have been ripped out) takes a great deal of skill, experience and appreciation of the medium.

Any effort to try and raise the bar gets our support, so props to the Email Standards Project and to Freshview for starting it.

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123 Strikes Again

You may have noticed that some of our sites have not been responding for the last few days. This is because 123-reg.co.uk had a name server outage. They didn’t tell anybody or apologise at all, they just decided that several thousand people could do without their sites for a couple of days. People are generally pretty upset about it – just check out these damning blog entries.

123 have always been pretty useless, but to date I’ve not found anyone offering a decent professional service that also covered .co.uk domains. 123’s big feature is that they are extremely cheap, unfortunately in every sense. This low price means that many of our customers have registered domains on there that we have ended up managing, so we have inherited their choice of registrar and default DNS host.
123 have NEVER responded to my requests for support, and I’ve reported major problems with their web interface many times – despite their takeover by pipex, their web interface has not changed at all (though the shiny home page has). It’s not possible to log in to more than one account (something we need to do often) as their authentication system is totally useless – it’s also impossible to log out (yes there is a link, but it doesn’t actually do anything)! At least there are Firefox plugins to work around their ineptitude.

When transferring domains to 123, it’s not possible to set up the DNS before the transfer has completed (or for them to simply retain existing name server settings – they always reset them to theirs), so it’s impossible to transfer a domain to them without downtime and exposure of a nasty parking page on your domain.

Their “managed” hosting service is nothing of the sort. Steer well clear. I blogged about that quite a while ago.

All this adds up to something that is a lot less than professional. So from now on we’ll be hosting our domains elsewhere, and suggesting that all our customers do the same.

I’m very happy to see that one of the better registrars I’ve used has finally got .co.uk accreditation.
They have a pretty and functional web interface, full access to zone files (if you want it), and they’ve answered every support request within a couple of hours (and with a certain Gallic charm). I’ve also had good experiences with enom.com, though while they are relatively expensive for uk domains, they have a UK support line that’s not premium rate and is actually staffed by people who can do something about your request! The aforementioned blog post mentions Everydns, which looks like something to bear in mind if price is a real issue.