Hacker News Reader

> If everyone started sending marketing emails like this, then they would start looking like advertisements

I’m not sure they would. They’d look more like 'normal' emails. Very few people, in my experience, apply any formatting to their personal emails whatsoever, let alone go to great efforts designing a layout, colour scheme, etc. Currently, 'html email' is almost a euphemism for 'advert'; plain text emails are more like product placement in that they blend in with the 'real' content.

Remember when websites started to make advertisements that look like articles? How long did it take you to learn what was an ad and what is a legitimate article?

I'm not sure I have, yet. :(

I think this is the safest assumption. (@_@)

A lot?

>Very few people, in my experience, apply any formatting to their personal emails whatsoever

Outside of technical circles, this isn't really true IME.

I mean, I fought the plaintext good fight for years, but now in the year of our lord 2017, I frequently send emails that include boldfaced headings, indented paragraphs, true bulleted lists, etc., because it improves readability vs. "ocean of plain text" for most people.

For me, the kind of content that warrants that kind of treatment is usually something that I want documented somewhere else anyway.

So often its primary existence is as a word/PDF file, or in some remote system like corporate Wiki.

The upshot is that anything fancy in the email body is a case of copy pasting and hoping something relatively legible comes out for the people who don't want to download the attachment or click the link.

Structural markup is different from email designs with background colors, borders, hero images, and the like. It still essentially reads as text, even if it's not technically plain text.

I love the promotional filter. I can look through the 50-60 promos and newsletters I get every day at one shot, open the 0-5 that look interesting then wipe everything. Then something happened where Bryan Harris' VideoFruit emails started coming directly into my inbox rather than the promo folder where they had been.

Guess which is the only email list I've unsubscribed from in the last month?

I like the promotional filter too. I never open it.

Which is a shame, because you're incentivizing people to try and get around it. Nobody's forcing you to sign up for these email lists, and you can unsubscribe at any time. I don't understand the hate these lists garner.

>If everyone started sending marketing emails like this, then they would start looking like advertisements, they would feel less personal, spam and "promotional" filters would adapt, and you'd be back to square 1.

True, but this is the case for every other marketing technique also. There will never be one permanent "best" way to get the most attention from readers for exactly this reason. The article does seem to miss this aspect. Plain email is currently probably a reasonable move in certain cases, in the ongoing dance of trying to get things read.

I do agree, though, that using plain email to avoid being filtered as a promotional message is not a respectful out very useful angle. I'd prefer to receive lightly formatted newsletters that work fine on mobile and were identified as marketing on my devices.

One way it works better is that there are people, like me, who have noticed that humans who want to talk to me (as opposed to wanting to sell me something) don't send HTML email.

So on my private personal account (not the ones I use for important things like banks), all HTML email is filtered directly to /dev/null.

That's caught exactly one personal email I'm aware of in ~15 years (I forget exactly when I added that to procmail). It might have hit others, but it is a far better false-positive rate than any other individual test.

Do the email client still default to TXT nowadays ?

Regardless how basic the email, it seems Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail always send them in HTML and I need to do something special to send it in plain text.

At work, the mail very often have some sort of minor formatting. A bold sentence here, a reply in a different colour there, or even simply links. Except for automated alert message from a system or another, the emails are basically always HTML.

Most of my friends and family to use Gmail; one uses Hotmail, and I have no trouble getting mail from any of them. I have no idea what Outlook does.

A lot of my work email indeed is HTML - people do love their red text and jokey memes. I'm talking about my personal mailbox that I use almost exclusively for talking to friends and family.

"Works on my machine."

In Thunderbird, you have to change it to plain text. I default to sending plain text, as a general rule. I usually read in plain text but currently have one system set to view in simple HTML. I forget why I changed that.

I assume HTML is fine so long as you limit the styling so it appears like a person wrote it

> One way it works better is that there are people, like me, who have noticed that humans who want to talk to me (as opposed to wanting to sell me something) don't send HTML email.

Except for legitimate automated emails. You know, like email confirmations when creating or updating an account, order confirmations, delivery notices, new login security notices, billing notifications, etc. are often sent in HTML email. If you literally pipe any HTML email to /dev/null, you will not be able to successfully register for any site that requires an email address, which is just about everything in today's world.

> (not the ones I use for important things like banks)

Why is why this works, if you have a seperate email account for people, you can then check the email account for companies once a day without missing anything. IMO, it's a great compromise allowing for connectivity without dealing with junk.

I disagree. Instead of partitioning with rules and filters, you're partitioning with accounts. It's less granular. It's not like the two accounts method is going to eliminate problems of false positives and false negatives. It just means you have two accounts to manage.

It's more granular as all companys that use my private email address are a bad actors.

I am essentially adding one bit of information to every email.

You both missed the trick. I could have been more clear in my description. It isn't two accounts to manage - it is (counted just now) 131 addresses. To the vast majority of those addresses, there is exactly one legitimate sender. I've started thinking of them as revokable leases on my inbox.

Setup for a new address is one line in my config management and takes less time to create than a filter in Gmail. There are other benefits, two of which being that it is easy to completely turn off someone who won't stop spamming, and it makes it obvious who is selling your address to whom.

Of course, you need a mail server and a domain, so it isn't for everyone. But this scheme has made it so much easier to control my email.

I think OP is talking about having a dedicated email for personal correspondence with people (and another for day to day usage with everything else).

So nobody who wants to talk to you uses Gmail?