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Good luck! I had the "pleasure" of working on HTML emails a few months back. It was unbelievably painful. Getting even a simple email to display consistently ac
by marcell 9y ago
Good luck! I had the "pleasure" of working on HTML emails a few months back. It was unbelievably painful. Getting even a simple email to display consistently across a dozen different mail clients is a huge pain. This is why so many marketing emails use giant images for everything--it's the simples way to get consistent rendering.
I predict whatever Google launches will work in GMail, and GMail only.
- taeric 9y agoI further predict it will work in GMail and Inbox differently from each other. Which is just mind boggling. Why!?
- JoshMnem 9y agoEmbrace, Extend, Extinguish -- then walled garden.
- chrismorgan 9y agoMost of the pain of HTML email is Microsoft’s fault, because they have persisted in using the MSO (Word) HTML render/editor in Outlook and Windows Mail, and it’s worse than IE 5.0. (Outlook 2003 switched to the IE renderer, and everyone rejoiced; then the Outlook 2007 went back to the MSO renderer for rather crummy reasons and all web people boggled and despaired.) Sure, other clients have their inconsistencies, but they’re nowhere near as bad as MSO, and they actually get fixed over time. Microsoft, on the other hand, persist in using a rather buggy engine from twenty years ago, unchanged (I don’t know that there haven’t been any functional changes or bug fixes since then, but if there have been they’re minor or obscure).
- ShroudedNight 9y agoI'm fairly certain that Lotus Notes is deserving of at least as much scorn for its mail rendering as Outlook.
- kbenson 9y agoConsidering I did ISP tech support, including mail client setup, for a few years in the late 90's and early 2000's and never once encountered Lotus Notes, I think it may be like in kind, but nowhere near like in quantity.
- pjmlp 9y agoLucky you, I see it every single day.
- jackvalentine 9y agoNotes is/was typically used in corporate setups. I'm not sure any non-business user would have ended up trying to use it.
- kbenson 9y agoI would have thought the same of Microsoft Outlook (not Outlook Express), but those calls were fairly common. Perhaps Microsoft Office was just more commonly encountered outside a corporate environment.
- jackvalentine 9y agoOutlook has always been fairly accessible to the home user, through home use programs or various versions of Office. It even comes with home editions these days.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoNotes was an interesting product until people started using it for email.
- dr1ggins 9y agoI had to do client work once that required Lotus Notes support and I swear that program runs HTML through a blender before trying to render it. It makes Outlook look like Chromium.
- acranox 9y agoOn top of that, it will only work well in Gmail on Chrome. Gmail on Firefox is already kind of a shitty experience, it will only get worse.
- JoshMnem 9y agoMarketing emails use giant images to push the text content below the fold, because they want to entice the user to enable images. Images need to be enabled to track opens.
- jrobn 9y agoSometimes I think e-mail should have just stayed plain text. No HTML renderers or other fancy stuff. Just type what you want to say and to whom and send. You know what does fancy marketing "e-mails" really well without all the horrid HTML hackery? It is RSS (or Atom).
- kuschku 9y agoMarkdown support would be nice, though. GitHub flavored.
- dingaling 9y agoIf HTML e-mail hadn't been invented then the need would have been fulfilled by something else, particularly for corporate environments where formatting and marking-up e-mails is essential to communication. For a while in the late 90s / early 2000s we had RTF e-mail.
- berbec 9y agoattachment: winmail.dat