Is there even a standard for rich email?
For me it feels like we need one and it should say e-mail must be UTF-8 Markdown.
Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails
81–90 of 214 posts
Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails
#82An email user's viewpoint: pretty emails formatted like web pages (e.g., like what GOG.com sends) may provide a sense of accomplishment to the designer, and their employer a warm, fuzzy, Brand-CompliantTM feeling -- but as a user I kind of like emails that are just... messages. With hyperlinks if it's appropriate. Images aren't always a great idea -- lots of clients block them by default. Why not have just text in pa…
You're not the average consumer probably. That or you don't even realize how a well-deaigned email can grab your attention.
You're probably not a user of the average PC and internet connection out there. On low-tier equipment well-designed can turn very quickly into utterly frustrating.
But you are right about the last part...when the user's UI locks up for a few seconds your email is certain to grab their attention. Just not in the way your carefully designed newsletter was intended to be remembered, though.
Plain text mails work better in every possible situation and are guaranteed to be formatted in a readable way. Meanwhile your average marketing newsletter is almost guaranteed to not be displayed in the correct manner as most decent email clients will just outright block any image content by default, and if your designer had the bright idea to also embed all text in images so their carefully selected font looks nice everywhere, well, I can't see anything without manually enabling pictures and then waiting 5+ seconds to see what the email is even about. And why would I do that?
Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails
#83I'm watching to see if this takes off, and how the developer does. It's already at the top of HN, so that's a great start.
The developer has positioned this as a much needed solution to an age-old problem: how to make Outlook-compatible email look great. But $19 per month for a specialized HTML editor is expensive to say the least.
Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails
#84HTML in email is legacy hell. I wonder if someone wants to create a new MIME-type like text/html+css, and clients who want can implement it. In theory you could have representations of the message like video/mpeg4 and text/plain, and depending on the client capabilities and configuration, the receiver could watch a video or read plain text. The information content of the 2 (or more) don't even have to be the same! Fo…
It boggles my mind that Microsoft hasn't updated the Outlook desktop app to use the rendering engine from Edge rather than the 10+-year-old IE engine. That would resolve so many e-mail rendering issues. I imagine it must be due to security concerns.
I imagine it has less to do with security, and more with backward-incompatible changes.
Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails
#85An email user's viewpoint: pretty emails formatted like web pages (e.g., like what GOG.com sends) may provide a sense of accomplishment to the designer, and their employer a warm, fuzzy, Brand-CompliantTM feeling -- but as a user I kind of like emails that are just... messages. With hyperlinks if it's appropriate. Images aren't always a great idea -- lots of clients block them by default. Why not have just text in pa…
Don't think transactional e-mail like "your order has been dispatched", imagine "You are invited to our annual conference", "We miss you, here is a %50 discount coupon for your next order!", "You have been accepted to our beta program" or "Unfortunately your application has been rejected" kind of e-mails.
When there's an e-mail about something special(in a sense that it's not happening all the time), I tend find it suspicious if it is not well formatted. If it's going to make me happy, better be formatted happy and if it is going to make me sad better looks like making me sad was taken seriously.
Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails
#86We've now reached the intersection of Photoshop and Email.
Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails
#87Earlier 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.
You're probably not a user of the average PC and internet connection out there. On low-tier equipment well-designed can turn very quickly into utterly frustrating. But you are right about the last part...when the user's UI locks up for a few seconds your email is certain to grab their attention. Just not in the way your carefully designed newsletter was intended to be remembered, though. Plain text mails work better…
Not to be overly cynical, but are people with low-tier equipment the ones that marketers usually care about?
It’s not really about what ”works best” for the average recipient, because these emails are not sent out of the goodness of the senders’ hearts. If data show that fancy HTML emails translate into more paying customers, then that’s what drives these decisions.
It’s of course possible that this is not the case, however to be convinced of that I’d like to see the stats rather than speculation based on individual people’s subjective experience. And naturally it can depend on the product and target demographics, too.
Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails
#88An email user's viewpoint: pretty emails formatted like web pages (e.g., like what GOG.com sends) may provide a sense of accomplishment to the designer, and their employer a warm, fuzzy, Brand-CompliantTM feeling -- but as a user I kind of like emails that are just... messages. With hyperlinks if it's appropriate. Images aren't always a great idea -- lots of clients block them by default. Why not have just text in pa…
Great points but email is the easiest thing to A/B test in the world. If you were correct, somebody would have figured it out by now.
Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails
#89An email user's viewpoint: pretty emails formatted like web pages (e.g., like what GOG.com sends) may provide a sense of accomplishment to the designer, and their employer a warm, fuzzy, Brand-CompliantTM feeling -- but as a user I kind of like emails that are just... messages. With hyperlinks if it's appropriate. Images aren't always a great idea -- lots of clients block them by default. Why not have just text in pa…
You're talking about optimization. In your opinion emails with fancy layout and "on-brand" design will get a lower level of engagement than plain text with well-written copy. You may well be right (in a lot of cases.) But you don't know that. It's a guess based on your biases and assumptions. This is why it's critically important to measure things when you optimize them. Believing that you should engage with your cus…
Normally you'd think the burden of proof would be on the side requesting considerable resources and infrastructure to send something that doesn't render properly under the most basic privacy settings and cannot be displayed text-only (like in notifications).
Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're talking about optimization. In your opinion emails with fancy layout and "on-brand" design will get a lower level of engagement than plain text with well-written copy. You may well be right (in a lot of cases.) But you don't know that. It's a guess based on your biases and assumptions. This is why it's critically important to measure things when you optimize them. Believing that you should engage with your cus…
Normally you'd think the burden of proof would be on the side requesting considerable resources and infrastructure to send something that doesn't render properly under the most basic privacy settings and cannot be displayed text-only (like in notifications).
I would assume that side has, in fact, established that proof.