Mark Brownlow interviewed David Greiner, the brain behind the Email Standards Project. He asked David what the project's goals are and if he thinks he can really influence the big corporate machines behind Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail and other email clients.

Here are some quotes from the interview:

"What really tipped me over the edge was the release of Outlook 2007 earlier this year. This saw one of the most popular email clients in the world go from virtually perfect web standards support to almost none. That one really caught me off guard. The web browser world was making leaps and bounds toward better standards support while the email world took a time warp back to 1998."

"the short-term [goal is] trying to kick-start a conversation with key individuals from Microsoft, Google, IBM and Apple and working with them in any capacity possible to make progress. Once that happens, we'll focus on keeping the design community in the loop and encouraging them to move towards completely standards based HTML emails."

"The web site has been live for less than a day and we've already had more than 100,000 page views and some fantastic plugs all over the web."

"we've already had some contact with a major player in the email client world expressing their interest in the project"

"If those responsible for designing HTML emails could build them knowing they'll display consistently across all major email clients, they can dramatically reduce the development and QA time required."

"Of course, making recommendations is a whole lot easier than implementing them, but we're patient and in this for the long haul."

"We're also looking to enlist the help from anyone who might have a contact within Gmail, The Windows Live Hotmail team, and any other email client currently sitting in our "Improvement Recommended" category."

"Starting a dialog with the right person is the real priority right now, so if that's you, please get in touch."

Read the entire interview here.