Today Gmail announced they are supporting media queries in Gmail and Google Inbox. This should simplify the creation of emails for multiple platforms. The full list of supported rules can be found on the Google Developer Site.
Zurb announced today version 2 of “Foundation for Email”, a full stack for designing content for responsive email.
It looks rather nice, with features a modern web developer might look for when working on email content. It has many of the things you’d expect a web design stack to have. It support SASS for styling, includes browser sync for previewing content as it’s edited, both on a local browser and on a device, and uses gulp to tie the workflow together.
But it also has some features useful for email that you’d be unlikely to find in a web design stack. It has an inliner, to convert separate SASS/CSS and HTML content into a single HTML document suitable for sending by mail. And it supports a slightly extended HTML format called “Inky”, which lets you use simple tags like <row> and <column> to develop grid-based content, then compile those into old-school HTML tables which mail clients will happily render.
And it comes with ten starter templates for different types of email.
You can find documentation, downloads and examples here.
A bit of older news, but worth a blog post. Early in August, Gmail announced changes to the inbox on both the web interface and the android client. They will be pushing authentication results into the interface, so end users can see which emails are authenticated.
These are not deliverability changes, the presence or absence of authentication will not affect inbox delivery. And the gmail Gmail support pages clarify that lack of authentication is not a sign that mail is spam.
This isn’t a huge change for most ESPs and most senders. In fact, Gmail has reported more than 95% of their mail is authenticated with either SPF or DKIM. Now, Gmail does a “best guess” SPF – if it looks like an IP should be authorized to send mail for a domain (like the sending IP is the same as the MX) then it’s considered authenticated.
It’s good to see authentication information being passed to the end user.
Email is, still, primarily a written medium. This means that good copywriting is crucial. Today I opened up an email and the pre-header says:
Laura, should have get your Naturals Sample Bag.*Web Version
Wait. What?
Maybe they mean “should have got”? But that’s implying they’re sending out free sample bags to everyone. That can’t be right. But I can’t tell because with images off that’s the only text in the mail, except the footer and legal information.
When you load images you get a little more clarity. Apparently, making a big enough purchase trigger a bunch of samples to be included in your delivery. So the line possibly should be “Laura, get your natural samples bag.”
Maybe it was intentional. After all it did get me to load images to see what the email was about.