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Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

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Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#151

Post by extra88 »

lucideer wrote: post #138
zwaps wrote: post #73

I receive a lot of newsletters and communiqués, some of which I even signed up for. So, I don't know what designers use to receive e-mail, but here in the non-designer / non-linux world, Outlook is pretty popular. Now, Outlook - at least all configurations I have seen, has pictures via HTML disabled. I have sampled a few IT departments only, of course, but I feel like this is probably a pretty common policy. So let m…

Outlook is probably the most common desktop client, but I think most people (even in corporate settings) are using webmail these days; either Google Apps Suite or Office 365. The former at least displays images by default (Google re-hosts them and rewrites the email source). Not sure if MS does the same.

Outlook for Web does have something similar now they call "Outlook service" that loads images through the service under their Privacy and data settings. I think it defaults to "Always use" and the alternative is "Don't use." It sounds like it definitely protects your home IP address from being exposed, it might not prevent a tracking pixel working as read receipt if it doesn't fetch the image until you open the message.

My messages still don't load remote images and are topped with "Some content in this message has been blocked because the sender isn't in your Safe senders list" followed by a link to add the sender's address to the trusted list and another link to show blocked content in this particular message.

I have Apple's Mail desktop and mobile apps set to not load remote content but I think the default is for them to load.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#152

Post by citrin_ru »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #101
buro9 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I do know from measuring my marketing and transactional emails is that the least possible formatting results in the lowest probability that I end up in the spam folder. The hypothesis I had here (unverified) is that using a tool to produce email makes your email look like spam produced by that tool (by other people). My hypothesis more specifically is that spam detection software weighs similarity in the structu…

Are you aware of any studies verifying this hypothesis? Would be very useful in my team’s roadmap.

Spammers sometimes (often enough to bother) are trying to fool spam filters by adding invisible or hard to see text copied from ham messages (e. g. it allows to bypass Bayes). To counter this spamfilters are trying detect and penalize invisible text in HTML emails e. g. ...., display:none, text with the same color as background, e. t. c.

Running something like headless browser (Chrome) to parse HTML emails would require too much resources so spam filters use either simple ad-hock HTML parsers or just regexps. If you use complex HTML markup, e. g. lots of nested div/span tags, different CSS styles on different levels and global block on top of all, they can be confused and will detect invisible text in a message where all text is visible (when CSS/HTML is rendered in Google Chrome; who knows how it would look in different mail clients).

If you use clean and simple HTML, there will be no leftovers like and you will not confuse spam filters.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#153

Post by omnimus »

krsdcbl wrote: post #99
bdathi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe is shitty. I only get lightroom in a abo which would be fine if the minimum time would be a month but it is a year. Best if both worlds for Adobe non for the consumer

If you work with a broad range of their softwares (ps/ai/ae/premiere power user here) the subscription system is awesome. Ends up being cheaper than buying it used to be & much less upfront costs for the business. They could do better on many aspects but it's nowhere near "shitty".

Hello Adobe marketing team.

Adobe replaced 600usd a piece software for 80usd subscription. The reason for it was because most people use like two pieces and upgraded once in 5+ years. Why? Because there are essentially no new features that have any value. Especially in print industry its basically ransom thanks to adobe's complete monopoly.

Btw it's not even monthly subscription. You can only get 1year contract that you pay of month by month. If you decide stop after two months you gotta pay rest of that 960usd. Lovely.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#154

Post by cies »

crixlet wrote: post #130
cies wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution we have is quite complex, as it also includes a builder where client can drag-drop blocks to create template (with text variables) for mailings. Mustache is used for color/font substitutions and also for text variable (like $recipient_name) substitutions. So: JSON representation of an email -> HTML+Mustache -> HTML+Mustache (only variables) -> HTML For (live during email building) previews we skip the la…

which builder are you using? i hav ea similar mjml + mustache setup, and am using blocksedit.com for client drag/drop. would love to see your setup!

In house developed builder in Reacts + Typescipt + JSON schema, we buildt is to be part of our SaaS offering to our clients.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#155

Post by cosmie »

pc86 wrote: post #71
jacurtis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like anything, this is a matter of perspective. The right team would find value in it. I used to manage a marketing team at a large e-commerce company and we spent tens of thousands a month in email design fees. We rotated through a group of freelancers to design emails. Even an email that was simply following one of our "tried-and-true" templates still would cost us $400 - $500 or so for a single email. That is just…

$500 to update the content of an email is downright robbery. Unless it's not actually "updating content" but is changing what side the images are on, tweaks layouts, adding a graph that wasn't there before, etc.

I've executed my own email programs for small projects before, and had the same reaction when I started working at an agency and saw how much we charged for that type of work.

Interestingly enough, it's actually not as padded as it seems. While the update itself may only take an hour or so of time, there's a few hours of communication/procedural overhead baked into these things:

- Receive a project brief - Align with client on the contents of the brief - Provide estimate and get sign off (potentially before the brief, if this is repeat work for an existing client) - Do actual work - Client review of work - Revisions. Usually incredibly minor nitpicking, but virtually always requested. - Final client review and acceptance

Whether the work takes 30 minutes or 30 hours, that procedural overhead is standard in BigCo marketing departments, and creates a price floor of about $500 since even the tiniest requests end up taking several hours of total effort (communication/procedural stuff + actual work). If you're engaging an agency instead of a freelancer, that floor jumps to about $1,000 as the entire process gets facilitated by an account manager + PM, so you have to add in a couple hours of their time as well for the procedural/communication overhead.

---

Not to say that's a particularly efficient process, or that it should be that way. But figured I'd share that perspective, since I initially reacted the same way you did when I saw those estimates for stuff that should have taken a trivially small amount of time to accomplish.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#156

Post by tootie »

Nextgrid wrote: post #92
tootie wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not the average consumer probably. That or you don't even realize how a well-deaigned email can grab your attention.

I don't like the argument about not being the "average consumer". Just because you're smarter at detecting & filtering out marketer's bullshit doesn't make it okay to keep perpetuating the problem because others aren't. If you deem the behavior nefarious or annoying it's not fair to justify inflicting it on someone else because they're not savvy enough to recognize/filter it.

It does though. Email marketing is all about crafting a message that gets the highest conversion rate and the rates are already pretty low. So if a blinking gif annoys most of your users, but the response rate goes from 3% to 4% it's a win for the sender.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#158

Post by skipnup »

lucideer wrote: post #138
zwaps wrote: post #73

I receive a lot of newsletters and communiqués, some of which I even signed up for. So, I don't know what designers use to receive e-mail, but here in the non-designer / non-linux world, Outlook is pretty popular. Now, Outlook - at least all configurations I have seen, has pictures via HTML disabled. I have sampled a few IT departments only, of course, but I feel like this is probably a pretty common policy. So let m…

Outlook is probably the most common desktop client, but I think most people (even in corporate settings) are using webmail these days; either Google Apps Suite or Office 365. The former at least displays images by default (Google re-hosts them and rewrites the email source). Not sure if MS does the same.

In the many companies I've seen in Germany not a single person used outlook OWA except for when outlook had problems starting up..

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#159

Post by andrei_says_ »

citrin_ru wrote: post #152
andrei_says_ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of any studies verifying this hypothesis? Would be very useful in my team’s roadmap.

Spammers sometimes (often enough to bother) are trying to fool spam filters by adding invisible or hard to see text copied from ham messages (e. g. it allows to bypass Bayes). To counter this spamfilters are trying detect and penalize invisible text in HTML emails e. g. .... , display:none, text with the same color as background, e. t. c. Running something like headless browser (Chrome) to parse HTML emails would req…

Ironically is a must for spacing tables if you want outlook compatibility.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#160

Post by rhines »

zwaps wrote: post #72
cpursley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This perspective is just as silly as turning off JavaScript in browsers.

Why is turning off javascript silly? Not that I personally disable all JS in my browser, but I'd say if your website can not be displayed without Javascript, then it is silly.

At one point I might have agreed with you, but after working on a few sites of my own I found that Javascript just enables a vastly better user experience. No need to refresh the page every time the user does something like liking a post or sending a comment, can load content more seamlessly with pre-loading or lazy loading, enables expandable menu bars to maximize space for content when the menu's not in use, things can be loaded faster and with less data usage if you send page diffs instead of full pages of markup, etc.

Javascript's terrible when it's used to generate pages from bloated frameworks that create 5000 DOM elements, add listeners to everything, load a dozen external scripts, and so on, but it's really valuable when used to actually improve the user experience.

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