Operation Asha – Evening of Hope (and creating e-mails with images)

The event has come and gone, but the opportunity to donate or contribute some time to a good cause dedicated to fighting tuburculosis in India still exists.  I had the great privilege to hear Shelly Batra – the head of Asha – speak today on fighting TB in India, and this is just as worthy of a cause as most out there.  I’m also very glad to have been able to support this organization with hosting and coding for a few e-mails they’ve been sending out in the lead-up to this event.

And that’s what I really want to write about tonight.

Coding for e-mails is like taking a trip back into the late 20th century.  Tables, inline styles, and direct formatting are de rigueur.  If you want to make a really successful e-mail with images, you also need to host them on a server that’s up 24/7.  Forget CSS and divs, too.  This can be both frustrating and amusing as you find yourself coding in ways you’ve tried to break the habit of doing.

So what’s the deal?  Why, after all the movements toward standardization on the web, have we not moved towards standardizing and updating web programming in e-mails?  Is it the added variables of mail clients?  I doubt it.  Web programming already has to account for so many different types of user environments, and it does so quite well.

So why is it that we’re still stuck using tables and in-line styles for e-mail here in 2009?  Anyone have an answer?

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