3 ms·
I am surprised that few commenters have criticized the tech-curmudgeon perspective that underlies most of the author's preferences. His rigid view of what email
by jawns 4y ago
I am surprised that few commenters have criticized the tech-curmudgeon perspective that underlies most of the author's preferences. His rigid view of what email should consist of is not really mainstream.
For personal and some business correspondence, sure, plain-text messages are fine. For transactional messages, structured metadata becomes more important. For anything from a brand, rich formatting helps convey information in a way that's consistent with the rest of the brand's digital presence -- which may not be important to him, but is important enough to enough other people that companies spend a lot of money to make it so, and many consumers appreciate it.
Dynamic elements, like calendar integrations, also have their place, and it feels like a lot of this stuff gets written off as cruft in his article, whereas it's not cruft to a lot of people.
If anything, I would like email to become even more advanced and fluid, rather than scaled back to fit in the little box he has crammed it into.
- guelo 4y agoCorporate spammers love rich formatting and dynamic elements. Nobody else wants that crap.
- Karrot_Kream 4y agoThere's a large overlap between people that want to use email as a central part of their lives and people who think everything other than text is just unnecessary waste. It's not really a technical thing, but a cultural tie. Think suckless folks or the Gemini project people. I think a good argument could be made for Email being a federated, open substrate to send and receive non-real-time messages but not many people who make that argument want to see rich messages even though it's technically an easily solvable problem (albeit hopefully not the way MIME has done it today.)
- krageon 4y ago> brand's digital presence Yeah, ok. You lost me there. Technology should exist to enable people, not some marketing asshole that thinks a button would look significantly better five pixels to the left.
- jawns 4y agoI don't think it's necessarily an either/or. If I go to the Washington Post website, it obviously has a distinctive style that is different from other newspapers. If I download a Washington Post mobile app, it's got that same distinctive style. Why should the email experience be inconsistent with the style of those other digital applications? What might seem like a silly, arbitrary "5 pixels to the left" style choice to you can be extremely useful in helping email users distinguish between a trusted brand, like a newspaper they subscribe to, and a knock-off or spam message. When plain text is the only cue, that's somewhat harder to do.
- krageon 4y agoIf you feel that is a distinguishing factor between spam and corporate spam, you are quite simply wrong. The layout of an email means less than nothing for authenticating the source.
- ori_b 4y ago> and many consumers appreciate it. I sure do -- if I get an email that has a ton of money spent on branding, it's a useful signal that the email is unimportant, and can be ignored.