- does this mean they only sent couple of emails / company in a 3 month period?
- or should this mean the number of email campaigns they sent?
I test it every day since the announcement, but the result is still negative. They promised it in this month... Well, tomorrow is the last day, so they still have time. ;) :D
I think it really depends on what clients you need to support.
If all of your subscribers use modern email clients (including the upcoming gmail clients) then inlining and tables won't be needed anymore.
BUT I'm pretty sure, that in most of the cases there are lot of people on the list who use some version of Outlook or legacy webmails. Therefore tables and inline style on tds will still be needed...
Actually we conducted some tests with which we will test the most essential css properties on gmail immediately when the update is rolled out. I also wrote an article about it, which I might be useful for the community. I would love to hear your feedbacks.
ESP has to provide ways to make sure that the essential parts of your email template won't be changed. Be careful if you need to copy-paste the HTML to a classic WYSIWYG editor. Those might modify the responsive code and cause rendering issues.
Here you can grab a free account on EDMdesigner - which is a responsive email editor, built for flexibility
http://app.edmdesigner.com/register
Totally agree with @Nicholas Rowan. There are only a couple email editors which produce quality code. Thankfully we are one of those, since we invested loads of development into our email generator engine. Thanks to Litmus, we are tweaking it continuously to be able to support most email clients. http://edmdesigner.com/compatibility
Robert, I don't understand truly the scale of your study:
"...analyzing 109,239 emails distributed by 4,166 U.S. e-commerce websites in a 3-month timeframe"
I'm sure that ESPs have a great influence on the adoption of responsive email design. Since many users only use the built-in editors of these tools. So if the ESP is not prepared enough for responsive email design, many users will still use old-school email templates.
This is one of the reasons why we started offering our responsive email editor for white-label integration into ESPs. This way we are helping user indirectly to adopt to the new "standards".