Designing a modern email | Hacker News Reader

Designing a modern email

blog.postmarkapp.com

60 pointsefedorenko66 comments

Perhaps a more fitting title would be "designing a modern spam message"?

Those emails are exactly the kind of emails that I never read.

There's a large difference in my mind between a newsletter a company only sends out to its subscribers and unsolicited e-mail advertisements.

It's called BACN.

While you may never read them, a surprising number of people do. I had an internship where my primary responsibility was composing HTML emails that went out to users on a weekly basis. If I remember correctly, the majority of our users opened the emails, and roughly 5-10% clicked on a link to content on the site. I imagine these number vary quite a bit, but for a site with a paid membership we saw a lot of traffic from HTML newsletters.

Yes, spam is a profitable business, that's probably why there is so much more of it than personal email.

I don't see how opt-in messages from a paid service qualify as spam.

I get a lot of opt-in messages that I didn't really opt-in for, as does everyone. How many people do you think even know what 'opt-in' is ?

Do you get any email you did really opt-in for? If so, just think of those.

No, I don't receive any mass-delivered email that opted-in for, because if I wanted to read something generic I would go to the relevant website or blog. I do, of course, receive some 'group email' which is equally relevant to all the recipients, but the sender obviously had all of us, recipients, in mind when writing the email. And I'm not even opposed to mass-emails, it's just obvious that for the most part these emails are not relevant to the recipients, and adding any styling to these advertisements isn't making them any more relevant or useful.

I frequently receive marketing emails from sites I never opted into. Either the site didn't provide a choice to opt-in or opt-out on the same form where I provided my e-mail address or they ignored my preference.

Usually "opting in" consists of daring to purchase something from a company, who will then send you weekly "deals" emails.

Indeed, many people enjoy reading content in their email client and prefer it over other delivery mechanisms. (Some people live in their email client.)

It's not spam if you sign up for it and want to get it. But even wanted emails need good design to be effective.

And once again, the anti-HTML zealots are out in force, declaring that just because they don't like HTML email, no one else should be permitted to receive HTML email.

A counterpoint:

I subscribe to several HTML newsletters, and the fact that they are in HTML is a huge advantage to me. It means that JavaScript Weekly (Peter Cooper's newsletter) isn't just a mass of URLs. And it means that I can quickly preview the newest fonts from FontShop without having to visit their site.

You may not like HTML email, but it has tangible benefits to many of us.

Kinda impressive how many zealots, near-luddites HN has - I think some of the opinions on this topic are more passionate than OS or editor wars.

    Kinda impressive how many zealots, near-luddites HN

Disliking HTML email makes someone a near-Luddite?

No - not at all, but making absolutist claims about it, and about how no-one should have to "endure" it, does - and there are multiple comments of that nature in this thread.

Or just send multipart emails. Best of both worlds (except bandwidth).

Nobody wants to receive e-mails like this.

Well if people read them and click on the links from these emails, then you must be wrong. Surprise! Did you even read the post?

If you don't want them, it doesn't mean nobody does. There's also an unsubscribe link at the bottom.

I am surprised at how I randomly go to my spam email address once a few months and end up interacting with services that I thought I would never go back to

It is like they get a second chance for sending me emails and not giving up on me.

Yes, I read the entire post from beginning to end. I still wholeheartedly believe that nobody wants e-mails like this. Yes, I'm speaking in absolutes and yes, I don't give a damn.

> If you don't want them, it doesn't mean nobody does.

Correct. I chose to speak in absolutes to make a point.

> There's also an unsubscribe link at the bottom.

That's wonderful, but I'm pretty sure the terminal emulator I'm running Alpine in doesn't do automatic URL lexing...

HTML is for the WWW. Please keep it out of e-mail. Thanks.

Curious, without HTML do you expect everyone to copy-paste confirmation and password reset links? How do you account for broken links due to message truncate or unicode rendering? What about aligning various sections of the message? Controlling the font size of header, body and footer?

HTML has as much history in emails as it does in the web. Taking HTML out of email is as hard as trying to take the Smart Phone out of phones today.

> Curious, without HTML do you expect everyone to copy-paste confirmation and password reset links?

Yes, I do.

> How do you account for broken links due to message truncate or unicode rendering?

I've never encountered a broken hyperlink due to message truncation or Unicode rendering. My terminal emulator is set to use the UTF-8 character-set. Please provide an example or demonstration of this.

> What about aligning various sections of the message?

Text comes left-aligned in most of the world and right-aligned elsewhere. What kind of alignment are you referring to here?

> Controlling the font size of header, body and footer?

What's the value in altering the appearance of the text you want to send to someone?

> HTML has as much history in emails as it does in the web.

Incorrect.

> Taking HTML out of email is as hard as trying to take the Smart Phone out of phones today.

I don't have a "smart" phone. What can I gain by owning one?

>Please provide an example or demonstration of this.

There are two limits that this standard places on the number of characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF. [1]

>What kind of alignment are you referring to here?

>Controlling the font size of header, body and footer?

I am talking about visual separations within the message. In pure text, everything carries the same weight, same font and same color. From the link of the site in the header to the unsubscribe at the bottom gets prominently displayed to you.

>Incorrect.

Well I couldn't find any reliable information to counter that. However as far I can remember, HTML emails have existed in the early days of Hotmail and Yahoo.

[1]http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html

It's trivially easy to setup an email client in such a way that links are accessible via keyboard or mouse.

    Curious, without HTML do you expect everyone to
    copy-paste confirmation and password reset links?

You've seriously never used an email client that makes plain text URIs clickable?

To be honest, I have never paid attention to it. However, I believe its not in the standard or RFC to automatically convert http:// and mailto:// text into clickable links. Therefore I wouldn't be surprised if there are email client that doesn't support it.

http://www.madboa.com/geek/pine-macosx/#mimeapps-web

Nice, thanks!

I worked for probably the largest hosting providor in the UK and directly worked on their email system which largely consisted of genric marketing emails.

They had a lot of data from these emails and it's hard to argue with the sheer size of the company, but data I'm pretty sure they didn't have is whether or not this type of behaviour turned off more customers than it turned on.

Like I said, it's hard to argue with the sheer size of the company but they were living off of momentum gained from companies which were bought, with churn rates forever growing in just about every brand.

While I'm not going to suggest this is all down to sending a few dodgy emails, it did feel like it had a lot to do with putting the marketing department before technical competency.

Since you enjoy speaking in absolutes, I'll speak your language. You're wrong.

Millions of people not only ask for emails like this, they enjoy them and engage them, and companies all over the world have conversion data showing that people want to get emails like this and use them to purchase things.

Nice try though.

Uh, interesting reply (because I am unable to imagine why someone would enjoy receiving an email with a "deal"). If true this is an interesting lesson about internet users... Do you have any data proving that such people exist, and even millions of them? Also, what countries?

> Nice try though.

Thanks for playing, Bucky!

And, no, I wouldn't consider myself to be ``butthurt'' over HTML in e-mail.

Modern email should be completely banning any markup but spaces, going to UTF-8-32 encoding. Maaaybe increasing the maximum column width from 80 to 120, but that's stretching it (hehe).

If the goal is to make an email feel like it's written by a human being, why not emulate what human emails actually look like? Does the author photo actually make it feel more human, or less? I can't think of a time I've ever gotten a real-person email that included a picture of the sender.

Because this would be a lie. We don't try to fool our users by sending them fake personal emails - who would believe that CEO actually emails every new user? But we want to show that there is a really small team behind the product, and you can get in touch with anyone just by replying to email. Every reply goes directly to the person who wrote email, not a support inbox.

> 79% of your readers spent longer than 2+ seconds looking at your email

I understand how opened emails can be tracked without javascript, via server hits to img files, but what magic allows you to track how long it was opened?

Use the tracking pixel and hold the connection open. When the user goes to the next email, the connection will close and you'll have the length of time they viewed it.

Indeed, the 2 seconds it takes to find the "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom.

Html in email is bad.evil.wrong.stupid. When will these people get it?

I like plain text as well but I dislike the fact that it looks so ugly. Why do we need to insert line break at 72 (or something) characters? Can't we wrap text emails?

There's an RFC that nobody uses for rich-text e-mails.

[edit] found it! http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1523

Perhaps I need to think about what I don't like about html-formatted emails. I can't really put my finger on anything. I am not against html when I think about it. It just feels like it is not the right tool for the job. (I know I am doing a pretty poor job at explaining myself. Sorry!)

I don't like them either, for the exact same reason!

Thunderbird wraps plaintext emails by default.

Still using mutt, huh?

He's probably still using email for communication and not free mass media content delivery.

And how HTML in emails is getting in the way of communication?

Most people use GMail as their email client, so even when they read plain text emails what they actually see is HTML email. The only difference is typeface, but you can configure that.

HTML as a technology to render plain text obviously isn't getting in the way, because it's plain text. All the features of HTML beyond that get in the way by obscuring the plain text and the information plain text conveys. In my mind, email, or text communication, is not about presentation but is about textual content. If you want to deliver media or style or a visual presentation, it's just not email. I would strongly prefer if it was a plain url or safe attachment in format that doesn't allow any kind of scripting.

> All the features of HTML beyond that get in the way by obscuring the plain text and the information plain text conveys.

I don't see any obfuscation happening in the emails shown in this article. Rather, the article's suggestions give even more emphasis to the text.

"Grr HTML bad" is not a very defensible position.

> In my mind, email, or text communication, is not about presentation but is about textual content.

It was recognized before email even existed that presentation is fundamental to textual communication. Cf. the works of Jan Tschichold and Marshall McLuhan to pick two arbitrary examples.

I agree that typography, a tiny subset of HTML, is important, and that the emails in article look good and are very readable. However, like with most things, such as scripting and root access, there are security and eyecare concerns involved. And so, I think it is still best that only I am allowed to pick the font and spacing that are comfortable for me, and the sender can only send me plain text information.

Communication can include colors, images and videos. I don't see any reason why these can't or shouldn't be available inside an email.

The more ways you have to convey the information, the better, imo.

Why do you think so many books don't use colors, images and other ways to convey information? Why do you think comments on this website don't let you use colors, images and videos?

Colors and images were used long before text to convey information. Then they were used together with text (see first books). Using just text without colors and images is a relatively new invention caused by technical limitations, and it didn't last long.

And let me guess, a letter with a sketch embedded, or perhaps some calligraphy or flourishes isn't really a letter, right?

Mutt can render html emails via w3m or lynx. Any well-designed html email should degrade gracefully to either of those clients.

Best Practices for all HTML messages is to also send a Text-Only version. Have you configured your client to prefer the text version?

Nearly all marketing messages that I receive are HTML only, not multipart. In fact, this is a problem that seems almost as if it is specific to marketing spam; ordinary people who send HTML mail seem to use MUAs that sensibly send a plain text part as well. But whatever tools marketers use to send their "newsletters" seem to be ignorant of best practices, or they just don't care about the small market segment of people who don't read HTML mail.

This is not a complaint. I don't care to read what they're sending me anyway, and the wall of visual garbage that greets me when I open one of those messages has trained me to reflexively hit delete and move on.

I just checked the most recent 5 newsletter or marketing messages in my inbox and all of they were all multipart with a text version. Every message my company sends has a text version -- I think some email service providers generate one automatically whether you want it or not.

shrug Maybe it depends on the type of stuff you're getting.

I'm surprised you can access hacker news back there in 1994.

I'm one of the developers for the Direct Mail app mentioned in the article. Would be happy to answer any questions. Thanks for the interesting post!

I'd never heard of it, but just gave it a spin and it's really impressive.

I work for a decent sized publishing co that sends a lot of email newsletters as part of it's core biz. I know this e3 thing is part of your service, but is there any planned integration with something like Exact Target (via API, not just SMTP)? Thanks!

Thanks! We have additional integrations planned, but if you have something in particular in mind, please drop me (Jonathan) a note: http://directmailmac.com/support. Thanks for the feedback!

I want to underline one change they made that in my experience makes a huge impact: GET RID OF THE HEADER / LOGO

This is one of the basic steps that I've seen drive conversion almost every time be it ecommerce checkout / lead gen / email / etc.

The header distracts from your content, eliminate it or limit it as much as possible, especially when you have somebody that's already engaged (somebody added to cart, joined your list, etc).

In email they did exactly the right thing - center the user on the brand w/the "from address" or the title vs. wasting pixels in your content.

Several years ago I wrote about including company name in the email title as an "Always" winner for email:

http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/optimize-your-e...

Side note, anyone remember Google Wave?

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