Introducing the Email Markup Consortium (EMC)

What is the Email Markup Consortium?

The Email Markup Consortium (EMC) is a community-led group of industry professionals working to improve the email experience for everyone.

Senders, recipients, and email clients share the common goals of improving user experience, accessibility, performance, consistency, and reliability. However, currently there is a lack of cooperation in trying to achieve these goals leading to inconsistent results.

Recipients should be able to easily access the content of every email sent to them, regardless of their device, email client, assistive technology or internet speed. The EMC collaborates with developers, creation and sending tools, and email clients to drive this vision forward at every step of the email journey.

Why is this needed?

As stated above, there is a lack of cooperation between the relevant parties to work towards these shared goals.

EMC is not the first project to attempt to address this. There have been several efforts in the past including:

• The Email Standards Project 2007
• W3C public-html-mail mailing list 2007
• Fix Outlook 2009
• W3 HTML for Email Community Group 2014
• Litmus Microsoft partnership 2016

This highlights to us that there is indeed a gap and an on-going need for a project like EMC to help bring the relevant parties together and collaboratively work with them.

Why is this different to previous projects?

Previous projects gained good support and helped move things forward. However, most of them have now been shut down or just left mostly unused.

Longevity

One of the goals of the EMC is longevity. We are structuring the EMC so that when the current members have moved on, the project will still live and be supported. To achieve this, we’re making the project as open as possible. Everything is posted publicly on GitHub where anyone can contribute.

We’re also thinking about long term solutions for the continuing challenges of email markup as well as new challenges that may arise with new technology.  We’re not looking to only fix a few bugs. Instead, we’re looking to develop standards and maintain those standards moving forward.

Timing

We think the timing of this project is better in comparison to previous attempts. In recent years the email community has grown massively and collaboration has hugely increased. There are new projects coming up all the time, built by the community for the community, such as the huge EmailGeeks Slack group, Women of email, CanIEmail, How to Target Email Clients, and many more.

Evidence of productive collaboration

Seeing email clients collaboratively work on projects such as AMP for Email and adopting standards like BIMI shows us that different competing vendors in the email space can indeed work together.

How can people get involved?

The project is open source and you can find us on GitHub where anyone can contribute:

• You can start or join an existing discussion
• Contribute directly by opening a PR
• Open an issue like you would on any open source project

If you would like to publicly show your support for the project, you can apply to become an EMC supporter as an individual or an organisation.

If you would like to be more involved in EMC projects and the organisation’s direction, you can apply to become an EMC member as an individual or an organisation.

If you represent an organisation and you would like to sponsor EMC, please get in touch.

EMC Administrators
Mark Robbins, Hussein Al Hammad, Alice Li