5 ms·

But do they really? Most those "nicely designed" emails, to be honest, are spam. Either outright spam, like v14g4 and p3n1s pills (modern mail systems deal with

by smsm42 6y ago

But do they really? Most those "nicely designed" emails, to be honest, are spam. Either outright spam, like v14g4 and p3n1s pills (modern mail systems deal with those well enough), or only slightly more respectable spam like "you bought in our store once, so now we will hound you forever with ads for our good and services that you don't need anymore". Among this sea of garbage, there are rare islands of useful updates - like genuine newsletters I subscribed to, or email from my doctor about test results, or reminder from my bank that they are going to deduct that car payment, whether I like it or not, so there better be money there, etc. And of course Amazon shipping notifications! If all those need any HTML, then only the most rudimentary one. Of course, if you asked a user whether they'd want to get ugly marketing spam or beautiful one, I guess they'd choose the beautiful one. But that's not the right thing to ask.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cerved 6y ago
yes, they do
jjav 6y ago
> Most those "nicely designed" emails, to be honest, are spam. Indeed. The number of HTML elements in an email scales pretty linearly with the probability of it being spam. Plain text is almost 100% certain not spam.
- mijamo 6y ago
  My experience is opposite. I have never received a scam email with HTML, is always plaintext that tried to mimic a regular conversation.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    You must have a hell of a spam filter.
- SirHound 6y ago
  A quick scan of my inbox and spam folders would refute this
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I just looked through my Junk folder and it took me about 30 seconds to find an email that was sent as plain text. Most of this time was spent digging through Mail's menus to figure out how to show the raw message.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sloby11 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure that this comment was sarcasm
- yakubin 6y ago
  Unless it's from a Nigerian prince.
- zaarn 6y ago
  That is completely antithetical to my experience as mail server operator and someone who gets a lot of spam. Nearly 100% of spam is plaintext, a small fraction uses badly designed HTML that barely displays in the client.
  - tesseract 6y ago
    This may come down to whether you consider marketing email from legitimate businesses to be "spam" or if you reserve the term for the more scammy/seedy type of mail.
    - zaarn 6y ago
      I unsubscribe from marketing mails, those are legally required to have an unsubscribe link in them. You should try clicking on that if you don't like marketing mail. If they don't stop you can threaten legal action in both EU and US without issue. If it doesn't have this link, it's spam. If it's trying to get me to buy something I didn't explicitly wishlist on a store, it's spam. If it's unsolicited marketing, it's spam. And even if I were to include all marketing email, including those I am interested in, then plaintext mail would still constitute the majority of spam mails I receive.
      - varjag 6y ago
        Any unsolicited marketing is spam, unsubscribe link or not.
        zaarn 6y ago
        That's... what I said. I mentioned the unsubscribe link for solicited marketing mails, where that is in fact relevant. Unsolicited email would be pretty damn illegal in my home country to begin with (and a GDPR violation).
        jeltz 6y ago
        It is illegal but very common. Many of those emails with unsubscribe links are unsolicited. They either spam all their former customers no matter if they have opted in or not or they just buy links. Yes, the unsubscribe links work but what they do is in obvious violation if the gdpr and other laws.
- kureikain 6y ago
  I run an email forwarding service[1] so I deal with spam a lot. Spam usually has bad formating, mixed charset, old/broken layoyt etc. Most of time, spam are odd designs. Example they only have HTML and didn't have the corresponding plain text part. They have large pictures and too little text, they have many "invisible" part so that hide behind element to trick you to click the wrong thing. Even in plain-text, spam tend to include random links, very long text, weird chracter etc A nicely design, or a plain-text emails(only plain text) with nice format all are good signal of non-spam. In other word, consistency is signal of non-spam emails. But sometime marketing emails-which you never explicitly subscribe to, you just register for an account and got marketing emails, can also be consider spam, but from google/hotmail point of view they don't consider these are spam and that's reason they have Promotion tab to put thing in there --- [1] https://hanami.run https://hanami.run
azernik 6y ago
This is absolutely not my experience. Spam uses HTML formatting, sure, but it's not "nicely designed". "Nicely designed" emails are things like flight confirmations, invoices, shipping notices, and that kind of transactional email. The common thread is that some entity with Real Money To Spend on a graphic designer is sending a (usually form) email to lots of people. Most spam outfits do not have those kinds of resources, especially since they need to change up their emails constantly to avoid spam filters. The closest I would say that the "pretty" stuff gets to spam is newsletters and particularly political fundraising emails; I'm on a lot of political party lists after spending copious college free time working on campaigns.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  The common thread about those non-spam transactional e-mails you mention is also that they're usually barely above plaintext. They usually contain some minimally styled table, and some of the company colors. Maybe their logo somewhere. That's in stark contrast from the spam these same companies send, which is where all that "Real Money To Spend on a graphic designer" goes. Compare e.g. the spam PayPal sends you vs. the e-mails confirming payments you've made. In my experience, this is pretty universal. And speaking of universal heuristic, in my experience, the quality and relevance of content is strongly inversely correlated with the quality of design. The prettiest websites out there are ones that deliver negative value. The best designed (according to modern trends) user interfaces are the ones with worst ergonomy, wasting user time the most. And yes, the subset of spam that's most recognized - ED pills, reproductive organ enlargement, members of royalty looking for help managing their finances - they tend to be very simply designed. But their distinguishing feature isn't simplicity of design. It's the carelessness. Typos, bad grammar, highly visible formatting mistakes, etc. When, on occasion, one of that "old school" spam messages tries to pose as a legit transactional e-mail, you can see through the deception by noticing the carelessness in replicating the design of the company being impersonated.
  - azernik 6y ago
    > And speaking of universal heuristic, in my experience, the quality and relevance of content is strongly inversely correlated with the quality of design. The prettiest websites out there are ones that deliver negative value. The best designed (according to modern trends) user interfaces are the ones with worst ergonomy, wasting user time the most. This is just plain untrue, and seems to color your impression of email as well. See e.g. Delta vs Southwest (more polished look is more ergonomic site/app), or New Relic vs Datadog public-facing sites (indistinguishable in "quality" of the design, for competing products where IMO Datadog is better). What are some examples that put the inverse correlation in your mind?

by smsm42 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cerved 6y ago

yes, they do

jjav 6y ago

> Most those "nicely designed" emails, to be honest, are spam. Indeed. The number of HTML elements in an email scales pretty linearly with the probability of it being spam. Plain text is almost 100% certain not spam.

mijamo 6y ago
My experience is opposite. I have never received a scam email with HTML, is always plaintext that tried to mimic a regular conversation.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  You must have a hell of a spam filter.
SirHound 6y ago
A quick scan of my inbox and spam folders would refute this
saagarjha 6y ago
I just looked through my Junk folder and it took me about 30 seconds to find an email that was sent as plain text. Most of this time was spent digging through Mail's menus to figure out how to show the raw message.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sloby11 6y ago
I'm pretty sure that this comment was sarcasm
yakubin 6y ago
Unless it's from a Nigerian prince.
zaarn 6y ago
That is completely antithetical to my experience as mail server operator and someone who gets a lot of spam. Nearly 100% of spam is plaintext, a small fraction uses badly designed HTML that barely displays in the client.
- tesseract 6y ago
  This may come down to whether you consider marketing email from legitimate businesses to be "spam" or if you reserve the term for the more scammy/seedy type of mail.
  - zaarn 6y ago
    I unsubscribe from marketing mails, those are legally required to have an unsubscribe link in them. You should try clicking on that if you don't like marketing mail. If they don't stop you can threaten legal action in both EU and US without issue. If it doesn't have this link, it's spam. If it's trying to get me to buy something I didn't explicitly wishlist on a store, it's spam. If it's unsolicited marketing, it's spam. And even if I were to include all marketing email, including those I am interested in, then plaintext mail would still constitute the majority of spam mails I receive.
    - varjag 6y ago
      Any unsolicited marketing is spam, unsubscribe link or not.
      - zaarn 6y ago
        That's... what I said. I mentioned the unsubscribe link for solicited marketing mails, where that is in fact relevant. Unsolicited email would be pretty damn illegal in my home country to begin with (and a GDPR violation).
        jeltz 6y ago
        It is illegal but very common. Many of those emails with unsubscribe links are unsolicited. They either spam all their former customers no matter if they have opted in or not or they just buy links. Yes, the unsubscribe links work but what they do is in obvious violation if the gdpr and other laws.
kureikain 6y ago
I run an email forwarding service[1] so I deal with spam a lot. Spam usually has bad formating, mixed charset, old/broken layoyt etc. Most of time, spam are odd designs. Example they only have HTML and didn't have the corresponding plain text part. They have large pictures and too little text, they have many "invisible" part so that hide behind element to trick you to click the wrong thing. Even in plain-text, spam tend to include random links, very long text, weird chracter etc A nicely design, or a plain-text emails(only plain text) with nice format all are good signal of non-spam. In other word, consistency is signal of non-spam emails. But sometime marketing emails-which you never explicitly subscribe to, you just register for an account and got marketing emails, can also be consider spam, but from google/hotmail point of view they don't consider these are spam and that's reason they have Promotion tab to put thing in there --- [1] https://hanami.run https://hanami.run

azernik 6y ago

This is absolutely not my experience. Spam uses HTML formatting, sure, but it's not "nicely designed". "Nicely designed" emails are things like flight confirmations, invoices, shipping notices, and that kind of transactional email. The common thread is that some entity with Real Money To Spend on a graphic designer is sending a (usually form) email to lots of people. Most spam outfits do not have those kinds of resources, especially since they need to change up their emails constantly to avoid spam filters. The closest I would say that the "pretty" stuff gets to spam is newsletters and particularly political fundraising emails; I'm on a lot of political party lists after spending copious college free time working on campaigns.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
The common thread about those non-spam transactional e-mails you mention is also that they're usually barely above plaintext. They usually contain some minimally styled table, and some of the company colors. Maybe their logo somewhere. That's in stark contrast from the spam these same companies send, which is where all that "Real Money To Spend on a graphic designer" goes. Compare e.g. the spam PayPal sends you vs. the e-mails confirming payments you've made. In my experience, this is pretty universal. And speaking of universal heuristic, in my experience, the quality and relevance of content is strongly inversely correlated with the quality of design. The prettiest websites out there are ones that deliver negative value. The best designed (according to modern trends) user interfaces are the ones with worst ergonomy, wasting user time the most. And yes, the subset of spam that's most recognized - ED pills, reproductive organ enlargement, members of royalty looking for help managing their finances - they tend to be very simply designed. But their distinguishing feature isn't simplicity of design. It's the carelessness. Typos, bad grammar, highly visible formatting mistakes, etc. When, on occasion, one of that "old school" spam messages tries to pose as a legit transactional e-mail, you can see through the deception by noticing the carelessness in replicating the design of the company being impersonated.
- azernik 6y ago
  > And speaking of universal heuristic, in my experience, the quality and relevance of content is strongly inversely correlated with the quality of design. The prettiest websites out there are ones that deliver negative value. The best designed (according to modern trends) user interfaces are the ones with worst ergonomy, wasting user time the most. This is just plain untrue, and seems to color your impression of email as well. See e.g. Delta vs Southwest (more polished look is more ergonomic site/app), or New Relic vs Datadog public-facing sites (indistinguishable in "quality" of the design, for competing products where IMO Datadog is better). What are some examples that put the inverse correlation in your mind?