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Text. Just use damn text. Nobody wants to look at your logo. Why biz people have to ruin everything.
by globalreset 3y ago
Text. Just use damn text. Nobody wants to look at your logo. Why biz people have to ruin everything.
- mr_mitm 3y agoI'm pleasantly surprised that amazon actually sends plain text emails. Pretty much every other corporation insists on HTML mails.
- bilalq 3y agoI just checked, and they don't. It's certainly plain looking and without fancy styling/formatting, but they do send content-type text/html. The links and tracking pixel images are why they need HTML, I guess.
- chungy 3y agoThere's an account setting somewhere to always send plain text emails and do not send HTML. I don't know where the setting is, I enabled it many years ago. Been happy with that.
- m463 3y agoThis appears to be untrue. I looked at all the amazon emails in my inbox and they are all: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
- bilalq 3y agoDid you actually scroll through all the way? Some emails send both plain text and HTML. I looked through mine and indeed saw text/html for most Amazon emails (including AWS). Some AWS emails like ACM cert renewals were text/plain. Though like someone else said here, you may have changed a setting in your account preferences. The default is still HTML. ------=_Part_4161549_398020174.1685704999675 Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
- m463 3y agoI have zero html attachments. (These emails are not marketing emails which I don't get, they all relate to orders and shipping)
- JimDabell 3y agoThey aren’t talking about HTML attachments. HTML email is typically sent as a multipart/alternative email with one text/plain component and one text/html component. An email with attachments is a multipart/mixed email.
- mr_mitm 3y agoMine have the text/plain header. I must have checked that setting like the sibling commenter said.
- jimmaswell 3y agoTracking pixel in an email? I thought nobody had done that in decades because major webmail clients pre-cache all images to prevent leaking user IP etc.
- bilalq 3y agoI don't know about decades. It's true that a lot of clients do that nowadays, but they're definitely still used.
- legitster 3y agoIronically, plain text emails actually do better for us - the problem is that plaintext emails are often more likely to be caught up by spam filters.
- rossdavidh 3y agoThe data I've seen suggests the opposite?
- legitster 3y agoAll of our internal tests have confirmed this, and even the email providers have more or less confirmed the same thing: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/plain-text-vs-html-emails-data https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/plain-text-vs-html-emails...
- eastern 3y agoThat's HTML emails _pretending_ to be plain text. Meaning the 'plain' text is Html-formatted to look plain and there are tracker links and probably tracking pixels too. Real plain text should be just like something a human being typed. Also, ignoring the general scamminess of hubspot, the linked article says html mail is MORE likely to be flagged as commercial. The article, in fact, is entirely pro plain text.
- captn3m0 3y agoThe clients also need to focus on this. Apple Mail on iOS uses plain text variant to show snippets, but if you try to expand the email, it only supports HTML, without a fallback to plain text. This is often the case on slow internet.
- fanf2 3y agoThat isn’t true: Apple Mail is perfectly capable of showing plain-text-only messages.
- joaonmatos 3y agoThe post you're responding to probably meant in the event of alternative HTML+text emails. Obviously if the email is plain text-only it won't invent HTML to show the user...
- Yizahi 3y agoIf only it was a simple logo. My HRs send emails with a full blown wallpaper on top, which stretches the inbox on a smaller screen so much that horizontal scroll appears, and text below it also overflows. Or when I disabple dynamic content, then they manage to create links inside the graphical buttons with no alt text, invisible without the picture. And these are people whose main job are emails. Sigh...
- ryanwaggoner 3y agoApproximately no one outside of HN only wants text emails. And the argument that anything beyond plain text is a waste and ruins everything applies to literally every single medium out there where the written word is conveyed: webpages, magazines, printed flyers, books, etc. It's laughable to think that all formatting of any kind beyond ASCII is a waste. If it were up to HN readers, the entire world would be so ugly and boring.
- hattmall 3y agoUltimately it depends on if it facilities the delivery of information. In most cases excessive styling does the opposite.
- postalrat 3y agoWhy doesn't HN or reddit or most social media format messages in html like email? Email has been doing it for years. People would love it! Images, colors, tables, etc in every message! And why not in text messages? Its 2023 guys.
- Kwpolska 3y agoReddit does support images and tables in comments.
- hollerith 3y agoI love how there are thousands of internet forums, but you're a heavy participant on a forum that is so militantly text-only that emoji are silently removed from user-submitted content. It's almost like the policy you are arguing against has important effects on conversation quality that you don't understand or that you don't want to admit because your paycheck depends on email messages' being rendered as HTML. >Approximately no one outside of HN only wants text emails. Approximately no one outside of HN even knows that plain text is a thing distinct from HTML. Among those that do, many probably couldn't give an example from their digital experience of a place where user-submitted content must be plain text. (They can navigate those places just fine, though.)
- graypegg 3y agoSticker Mule sends marketing newsletter emails in plain text ONLY. I love it. They’re just: > Hey ${name}, > Our custom holographic stickers are on for on for ${deal}. And that’s it. I bet they have awesome deliverability because it’s… just email.
- hk1337 3y agoEmail is capable of having both versions of the email so the user can decide what they want. We should go back to utilizing that more.
- eviks 3y agoNobody outside a tech cave wants to lose all the rich formatting in communication either