MediaTemple’s Twitter account recently linked to a very interesting article on CSS support in email clients.

Now, while every knowledgeable techie in the industry knows email has always been a crappy platform when it comes to content, the results of the research conducted by CampaignMonitor is surprising. On a total of 65 CSS rules, Gmail only supports 33 of those, with 1 with partial or buggy support, and on top of that doesn’t support any Style or Link element in either the Head or the Body.

I mean, what? My favorite email client is actually one of the worse? Maybe not, let’s look at some other stats:

Hotmail supports 43 rules, 10 more than Gmail, and does support Style and Link elements in either the Head or Body (like the majority of recent mail apps). Yahoo Mail is the 2nd most advanced of Web Mail applications, supporting 53 CSS rules. Of course, Yahoo Mail supports the Style and Link elements in the Head and the Body too. Why Gmail’s lack of support for Style/Link elements is worrying is because only one desktop email client lacks this support too, IBM Lotus Notes 6 and 7. Version 7 was released in 2005 with a level of support already well surpassed by Outlook two years earlier, so go figure at how late Gmail is.

Coming in at a surprising 60 rules support, only missing 5 not so important rules (except 1, the e:hover pseudo-selector, supported by both Yahoo Mail and Hotmail but not Gmail), is AOL Web Mail.

And then you have Apple’s foray into the web mail space with Mobile Me, with a competitive support rating in at 52. However, it does not support Style or Link elements directly in the body, despite supporting them in the Head, although this could be seen as an effort to promote more standard HTML and CSS practices in emails by Apple rather than an actual lack of support.

On the desktop side, things are both expected and unexpected. Apple’s integrated OS X Mail app lacks support for only one of the rules, rating in at 64, while Mozilla Thunderbird is the gold standard by supporting it all, not surprising as Thunderbird runs on Mozilla’s Gecko platform, the same thing that powers Firefox. In fact, it is most likely that Thunderbird has an email rendering engine leaps ahead of other clients because of that.

On the unexpected side of the desktop comes Outlook 2007, with less support than 2003, Windows Mail which basically has the exact same rendering engine as Outlook 2003, and probably the most unexpected one, Entourage 2008, Microsoft’s Outlook for Mac per say, which has the exact same level of support than Apple Mail, making it highly suspect of using the same engine. I wonder what’s going to happen to that with Office 2011 for Mac, which Microsoft said will get rid of Entourage and have the first Outlook for Mac.

On the mobile side of things, the landscape is widely different and special. The iPhone is the most advanced, with support than Mobile Me, although not quite on par with Apple Mail, just 3 rules behind. Android Email is far better than Android’s Gmail app, actually coming in second with the Palm Pre not far behind.

Android Gmail comes slightly under its Web-based Desktop Client with 31 supported rules, followed by BlackBerry, which only supports 23 rules, making it the worse email client, for exception of Lotus Notes 6 and 7 that support only 11 rules. Yes, even Windows Mobile 6.5 and the very old Palm Garnet OS have better support, which brings in the question, why is the BlackBerry considered the epitome of enterprise communication? Of course, if you’re in the industry, you know why (there’s plenty of valuable reasons), but still, even more modern BlackBerrys not intended to save you bandwidth, like the Storm, have the same horrible render engine. In my opinion RIM products have just been getting worse over time. I guess being Canadian doesn’t make you competent in technology.

So what’s all this jargon of talk means for you?

Well, whatever situation you’re in, it means email is one of the worst communication material to send any kind of non-raw data. Just looking at Gmail’s growth and Thunderbird’s near non-existent market share shows how unimportant display has been in the email world and how you should maybe think of only sending text in your emails after-all.

Although as a fan of standards support, I would consider going Yahoo Mail Plus instead of using Gmail. But is it worth the effort? Gmail is so useful for so many reasons, and blends so well with Google Docs and stuff, and all of the Yahoo Mail Plus features are free on Gmail.

I respect Yahoo’s effort, but it might not be the right thing to focus on. Still, Yahoo has as almost as much active email users as Hotmail, Gmail and AOL combined, and a lot of these people rely on their actual Yahoo email address to do their daily messaging. In these scenarios, switching mail service is much harder as you have to give up your address. I know what it is, I’m tied to my Gmail address for my daily needs, and switching to Yahoo can be scary, especially since it’s such an unstable company right now. I’m considering switching to a corporate email address for daily use though, which would get me rid of that switching constraint.

One other hardly-covered aspect of that weakness in email is what newer services like Google Wave could bring, or even Twitter or Facebook. The odds are there, although for Google Wave it doesn’t look like it’s going to be any better; pointing at the face Google Wave is a Google product after-all, and Google surprisingly is a horrible company when it comes to HTML standards (just look at your source on Blogger, or Google Docs…)