Initial outline

[M-J-Robbins]

Can I Email

caniemail.com

Goal

A searchable database of html and css support in email. Will become the place to reference, as caniuse.com is for web.

Gathering the data

I’d like to open this up to the community but start with a limited invite list. I see a lot of poorly researched information about email written as fact, so want to avoid this where possible.

I’d start off by building some testing emails, each with it’s own purpose, media queries, css selectors etc. (I have some of these already)

We’d send the email out then log the results, initially in a google Doc but eventually in an online form.

Values in the database

Each html element, or css style can have 3 possible values

• true
• false
• null
  Each value can have a note attached (not sure how best to do this in json)

True = the code renders in some way, errors and hacks should be added as notes
False = the code is striped
Null = Tested but unable to get a clear answer, probably from looking at a screen shot or not being able to inspect element

Structure

HTML is pretty simple most of it will be on a single level but CSS will be a touch more complicated as we may need to list every possible value for each

"font-size": {
    "px": true,
    "zero": true,
    "em": true,
    "rem": true,
    "percent": true,
    "vw": true,
    "vh": true,
    "vmin": true,
    "vmax": true,
    "calc": true,
    "var": false                    
}

We could potentially run a separate test for each unit then populate these fields via that and override if necessary.

Updates

We can gather a list of admins, who have a deep knowledge of email rendering and accurate ways of testing that aren't influenced by ESP's, mail server, preprocessors etc.

Regular folk can submit data but it need it needs to be checked and replicated by one of the admins to get into the database.

Further down the line some of the testing may be automated with image diffing or code diffing via Litmus.