Either your message does have some useful information for the reader, in which case say that and then get out of my way, or it doesn't, in which case you're a spammer. There is no third option.
It's typically a notification in response to an action you initiated on some web application.
https://postmarkapp.com/blog/what-is-transactional-email-and...
2. Yes, abandonment will be higher if the user can’t click the password reset link in the email.
What a remarkable idea! "HTML mail = useless bullshit" is such a strong correlation in my mind that it had never occurred to me other people might see it the opposite way.
Personally, I've been using mutt in the terminal as my primary email client for several years, and I absolutely prefer plaintext email.
But this isn't about me. Nor is it about any other computer nerd here clutching their pearls over HTML email. The reality is that users of web applications — the kind that probably a significant proportion of HN readers develop to earn a living — expect HTML transactional email.
It's table stakes. That's just the reality.
Virtually all email clients support html since a decade and the expectations user have todays have changed.
To put it differently, it looks unprofessional.
Especially when dealing with technology, consistent branding actually has an important safety factor for consumers.
There is nothing in the average external email that requires HTML or CSS.
There is no useful content in any email that requires JavaScript.
"looks unprofessional" is cultural, and of the same significance as green vs blue text bubbles in your SMS messaging system.
Transactional mail typically requires some hyperlink for the average user.
"If you want to continue with the subscription, reply with the word YES on a line by itself. You can put comments on other lines and we will read them."
do-not-reply@marketing.com is one of the stupid innovations by people who can't automate their email. Transactional email gets handled by robots and fed into a ticketing system when it goes awry.
Treat your customers like customers, not consumers.
Transactional mail is not marketing mail.
It’s not a good look to declare things as stupid when you aren’t sure what the discussion is about.
I’ve worked with a system that let users order domain names by email and it was a nightmare to maintain. Don’t EVER build a system that relies on reading and parsing emails sent by users, it WILL fail horribly.
Oh no, you need to find a line of text in a string that contains the word 'YES'. How incredibly difficult. Are you even a programmer? This is entirely trivial.
Maybe they’ll write « yeah » or « YE » or « oui », because that’s what users do
Those users absolutely can write 'YES'. They're perfectly capable of doing so. They don't do so because they're lazy. We all know people that simply refuse to read any kind of instruction on a computer screen. They will skip past any and all prompts. Guess what? That's their problem, not yours.
Stop enabling laziness!
If you can't create a way to say "yes", which is at least as easy to use as checking a checkbox and clicking a button, why should I assume you're capable of, well, much of anything.
It's not that it looks unprofessional. It looks either incompetent, or deliberately obtuse. In either case, I'll take my business elsewhere.
"Yes alright renew my subscription, just make it start in two weeks this time"
Your "solution" fails immediately here, because it gives people a false idea that they are in a dialogue with you whereas they are actually just expected to reply in a binary way.
Finding "a line of text in a string that contains the word 'YES'" is indeed trivial, however if that's all you can think of you should not be employed in any position of responsibility as it demonstrates a profound lack of judgement, understanding of how real people behave, and general business acumen.
The point of a business is to make money. You make more money by making the experience for your customers as easy as possible. If you don't, another company will.
Or worse then, like idiots that cannot understand a simple sentence and write back « YES »
w3c suggests surrounding them with angle brackets [1], but I can't find a source that makes more than a suggestion. By reports, some mail user agents, and some users will include the trailing > in the url they provide to their web user-agent, so that's something to consider and make sure the destination of the link can handle.
Putting links on a line by themselves works well too.
If you don't know what a user prefers, it makes sense to send a text/plain with links as I've described, as well as a text/html with links in tags, because tagged links may be friendlier to some users and some mail user-agents are tragically bad at their job.
Right? Or do I have something wrong?
If you send long URLs – for instance password reset links with tokens in them – then you need to send them with an HTML part if you want them to be as reliable as possible. Leaving long URLs at the mercy of not just mail clients but the entire mail transmission apparatus, cannot be relied upon.
Furthermore, many emails are direct links to status pages of orders, account verifications, password resets, and so on, which are definitely most functional as a clickable URL.
There is nothing that requires any text to have any formatting. But basic formatting can help readability. There is a reason to include bold or italics. Or headings. Or maybe even a simple diagram/image, or make links more approachable than the raw url.
Snail mail letters can include all of the above (except links), why not email?
Even when written memos were the norm in business, they still had company letter head.
That non-existent third option is critical for good communication.
But only because the best way to accomplish the first option is to be cognizant of the way the information is presented so that it can be most effectively conveyed. And that can involve paying attention to layout and color and possibly including some graphics.