Is there a current or upcoming standard used by a current email client that lets one use Javascript in an email?

Question

I have a system that emails programmatically generated emails hundreds of times daily. They are going to open in outlook which I know will render the HTML differently than IE and disable scripting. But are there any upcoming standards that will allow one to JavaScript-ify their HTML emails?

Will it always be to big of a security risk? Is there no way for a client such as gmail to limit all JS operations to inside the body of the message? Will always be just too risky? What about future versions of outlook like office 2010?

Answer 1

Considering that even HTML / CSS support in email is rather limited it's safe to say that we're not going to see JavaScript supported in the nearby future. Not that I'm unhappy about that :-)

Answer 2

I don't claim to be able to predict the future; however, the with the limited html and css support currently available to HTML based emails as well as the huge crack down on scripts due to early macro viruses, I don't know if JavaScript will be added anytime soon.

I'd recommend to try and keep email messages to just basic messages and leave the behavior aspects of such to the web page version of such. If email clients began to implement such, the actual JavaScript object model would have to be limited so that a person couldn't really do window.open() nor attempt to send other emails out like they used to back in the day. With a limited scripting set, it wouldn't really be worth the different implementations.