I do as well, and believe that intimate person-to-person contact is solely the domain of SMS. But Email still has it's role, whatever you think of it. And part

I do as well, and believe that intimate person-to-person contact is solely the domain of SMS. But Email still has it's role, whatever you think of it. And part of that role is delivering complicated structured markup with modern design principals. And as of now, because most of the pillars of the industry don't quite care much about their products, developers are reduced to using 90's/early aughts techniques like table-based-layouts and inline CSS to support the old, shitty clients. For instance, in Outlook 2010, Microsoft actually downgraded their rendering engine. They used to use Trident in Outlook 2007, the engine behind Internet Explorer, which wasn't even very good at the time relative to it's competitors. And yet, it was TOO good for email apparently, as Microsoft decided to switch to the HTML rendering engine they had built for MS Word, instead of Trident. This dropped support for several common web features, and generally solidifying the idea that creating documents for email would be a PITA. It is what it is. Not a huge deal, it's just email. But all things being equal? It's a ridiculously lousy platform if you want anything to look good across an array of email clients. It's basically like the Browser Wars at their max, only it's a series of de-escalating moves. To continue with the war analogy, it's like Mutually Assured Horrible Rendering where companies are lazily sauntering to their positions of keeping rendering bad. Again, I understand nobody really cares, but if they did, I'd say support this: http://fixoutlook.org/ http://fixoutlook.org/. And to be fair, as bad as Outlook's 2007/20010 fiasco was, Gmail's CSS support is absolutely horrendous in it's own right. Obviously the webmail vs desktop discussion is it's own thing.