It's tempting to make shouldiemail.com and just answer "No" for all these features. Seriously though, it must be years between every time I see an HTML email which would not have been improved by being plain text.
When they see a plain text email from a site they would be more likely to think they are being scammed than to be impressed at its simplicity and ability to display in the terminal.
When every website is hacking around broken table layouts to get them to render in outlook (essentially Word), something is wrong and should be fixed.
> Because several of these constraints have been remedied over the years, many of the concerns that users had about subscribing have disappeared.
Read: Because we stopped asking permission and instead started spamming everybody who gave us their email address, people stopped thinking that not subscribing had any effect.
> The increase in sheer email volume over the years has created a scenario where people can’t possibly give all messages their full attention, so they care less about what they receive because they know they can easily ignore the noise or choose what they invest their time in.
Read: Our entire industry spams people so much that people know it's not worth reading.
> It’s no longer used strictly to describe unsolicited email messages. Participants in our study used the word “spam” to describe solicited marketing emails that they considered random, impersonal, irrelevant, with too much promotional hype, or coming in high volume.
Read: We required an email address for things that don't need one, then treated that as permission. How dare people consider our spam to be spam?
> Now that organizations are required to include an Unsubscribe link in their newsletters, this task has become easier.
If a company assumes that an email address given for identification can be used for marketing, or that it can be shared with third-parties/affiliates for marketing, then they are already pretty shady. I honestly have no way of knowing whether it's an actual Unsubscribe link, or whether it's a signal that the email address is actively read by a human and so should receive more spam.
> If users keep getting unwanted newsletters, the messages will start to backfire and become regular reminders that they’re annoyed with your company. Better to let them go.
This part I do agree with. Better still would be to not assume permission to send marketing to somebody just because there was a pre-checked both on a form.
This community is as much an echo chamber as anywhere else. Just because an opinion is common here doesn't mean it's correct or reflects the wider population.
I really don't think that that's true.
Taste is generated. Cool trendy startups make "nicely designed" emails, users come to expect that. If scam emails looked "nicely designed" and Google sent emails in plaintext, the "nicely designed" emails would be considered untrustworthy. As a counterpoint, an "average user" wants software to work, and forcing every email client to parse HTML (which is far outside the scope of what an email client should do, especially with html as complex as it is today) often breaks things in unexpected ways.
In my opinion, html and plaintext are both inappropriate for email. HTML is far too complex, and plaintext is a bit too simple. I think a markdown-like syntax would be the best balance, but I'm pretty sure that ship has sailed.
As far as I know, only old (possibly pre-Tiger) Mail.app in Mac OS X used to produce it.
I've corresponded with others, also German, and they had the same preferences, even if not as explicitly stated as the examples in my other comment there.
This is not an endorsement of the practice, just an observation.
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.
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.
Nearly 100% of spam is plaintext, a small fraction uses badly designed HTML that barely displays in the client.
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.
I very rarely get marketing mails from any reputable company that are completely unsolicited. In most cases it's a followup from trying out an offering or updates to products I'm using or are adjacent to those. If I'm not interested, I either ignore them or unsubscribe if it's repeatedly not interesting.
This is a much more effective "spam" strategy compared to "all HTML is spam".
Whenever I have to interact with a company, I check the spam folder for their replies.
The majority of mails in my spam folder is html mail.
I can recommend using the unsubscribe link if you forgot to uncheck the newsletter checkbox during registration. Alternatively send them a mail to A) remind them of the SPAM-CAN act or your local equivalent legislation and B) that they should delete your mail from the newsletter. That works almost always, if not you can always threaten legal action (where I live, that's an easy 600€ of profit in a courtroom).
Not all is as sinister as it looks.
The simply solution is to just can any senders that don't respond to unsubscribe requests. But those will be just as bad in plaintext as in HTML, so I don't see why Plaintext means it's not spam, they can do the same thing Plaintext.
In my observations badly formatted spam exists, but have big intersection with the spam which is relatively easy to filter out. Nicely formatted HTML spam on other hand is hard to filter because the only difference with legitimate marketing email is lack of any consent from the sender. Sure I can hit an unsubscribe link and my be never will get spam from the same domain again, but spammer will know that this email is active and will include the address in spam send on behalf of other customers.
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
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"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.
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.
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?
Do they? Do they really like it? Did anyone actually asked? And no, A/B testing your design's capability to trick the user into paying you money isn't measuring whether they like it or not.
I have an alternative proposal: average user just accepts what they're given, because they have no other choice. Nobody listens to their opinion (again, tracking and telemetry is not the same as listening to people). Abusive designs and patterns are adopted industry-wide very quickly, so there's rarely an opportunity for the user to vote with their wallet - after all, they can't choose something that's not available in the first place. On top of that, the average user lacks the mental models and language to conceptualize what is wrong and how much better technology could be if it was slightly less abusive. All they can do is accept that computers are annoying, and casually complain about this to friends and family.
Oh yeah, they do like it and want it. That is why they use it. And yes, I talked with a guy who was literally like "I like the emails colorful and such, but we found through testing developers respond better to plain, so I send plain to them".
Sometimes we are the odd ones and that is ok.
There's a reason the most popular media is video and images and the main social media platforms are practically platforms for sharing video and images.
The average person all over all the world is almost functionally illiterate (literacy level of a middle schooler or maybe high schooler, at best). They really, really don't want text. They'll only read as much as they have to, and they will definitely choose images over text if they can.
At the end of the day if you see another blob of text, you either skim through it looking for what matters or you just delete/archive it.
They could even hate it, but it just stands out for better and worst.
This is no different from snail mail, where important communication is usually on standard white paper while ads are high quality prints on nice goossy paper.
And obviously, "average users" notice the pattern. Just like my father who almost trashed an important tax-related mail just because it looked too nice, he thought it was an ad.
So the "average user" prefer to see nice ads, I can get that. But what the average user really prefers no ads at all.
Or worse yet, when the plaintext alternative version is broken/incomplete.
I regularly receive mail where the plaintext alternative version has templating variable names instead of actual values, where the html version has the values.
Also, systems that send mail where the plaintext alternative version is only something along the lines of “Your email client does not support HTML. Please read this newsletter at” and then a link. But of course, my client can read html too, I just have it set to view the plaintext version by default.
One of these days I will probably just set it to always prefer the html version instead. I use mutt, with elinks taking care of html to plain text conversion. I’ve been running my mail server for years.
But anyways it might soon be time for me to switch to hosted mail. I have a provider in mind.
(If your client interprets them, then you're not actually asking for plain text anymore.)
Making it unobtrusive enough to still look good when uninterpreted is a good goal. But that's very different from having nothing at all.
And there was a long history (about 100 years) of monospaced, mono-sized, typographic conventions based on typewriters and cheap reproduction (carbon paper, spirit duplicators, xerography), before the desktop-publishing era brought us out of that in the 1980s. The problem with formatting is that, like Johnny Rocco in Key Largo, someone always wants more, and not for your benefit but theirs.[1]
#ThisIsWhyWeCannotHaveNiceThings
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114500
In the Web world, counter to an argument elsewhere in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27113404), my experience is that Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. Straight ASCII text (via w3m or other text-mode browsers), or Reader Mode (where supported) is vastly preferable to many, many nines worth of sites' prescribed designs.
One thought I've had is that user agents could provide, at user discretion, additional typographic control to sites. But for the basics you're limited to 7-bit (not 8) ASCII. Everything else is earned, and you'd best degrade very gracefully.
I've seen websites written where every individual paragraph has an explicitly-specified location. I've seen blogs written entirely in header-level tags. I've seen writers who add nonbreaking whitespace to the start of every paragraph. I've seen blink, marquee, and carousel abuse. I've seen foreground and background colours you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion....
________________________________
Notes:
Inputting by hand (or maybe with a script - who cares anyway?) random Unicode characters to show that rich text is actually possible is the opposite of "smart" in a discussion between reasonable adults.
Yep, that was me that time as well.
> Inputting by hand (or maybe with a script
I did it by hand. There are websites to do this, but I’m not interested in doing this for any regular purpose, so I don’t think I have them saved. Besides, it’s more interesting to do it manually; you learn things about how Unicode works if you involve yourself in the low-level details once in a while.
> the opposite of "smart" in a discussion between reasonable adults.
Or maybe it’s humorous? You know, fun?
Fun?!? On my HackerNews?!?
Burn the heretic!
Most people are unaware that Unicode has that kind of character and even fewer people know what it does to screen readers.
The difference between showing off knowledge and trying to be show people a cool thing you know about is intent and it's REALLY hard to get that across on the internet.
Agreed, that's why I like emojis, for example. They're whimsical, and they increase a bit the bandwidth of written communication.
Alas, HN doesn't support them because of reasons ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://web.archive.org/web/20160417105503/http://www.gnksa....
Remote images are a crime, break the ability to search ofline or keep a record of ones conversation but they have one key advantage for brands which is to spy on you.
The only non-web client I've used much in recent years is aerc, which is basically covered under "mutt" in this case.
- Plain Text Mode
and
- uBlock Origin Extension is available (that can block also embedded JS)
People underestimate the attack vector of emails. I'm glad those scammers haven't figured out (at least until now) how XSS could work in Gecko with XUL. Heap spraying could easily be a thing, given that MS Outlook also still uses their outdated rendering engine.
Unfortunately, desktop Outlook is miserable with HTML support [1]. In particular, code blocks and quotes become an unreadable mess. The only way that I've found to include readable code blocks is to copy from VS Code, which somehow has the magic HTML combination that Outlook understands.
Say you’re a webshop and a customer has signed up for you “newsletter” then you kinda need HTML emails to show your advertised product directly in an email client.
Email serves every type of business, yes more could be just text - but some will never be served by that format.
For the sake of presenting marketing (Logos). Disgusting. Wear a mask, write text.
Totally different. Try for one week to substitute every sent/received email with web articles instead.
It's like a cake and an elephant not being essentially the same, just because they're both made of atoms.
You could specify "Content-type: text/markdown" if you want Markdown (although I don't know which email clients will understand that), although I think that plain text is OK.
I also dislike email newsletters or email discussion lists; either way, I would prefer NNTP.