HTML email is wrong. Period.
Show HN: Responsive Email Templates
91–96 of 96 posts
Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work with HTML emails all day long and it's awful. The short answer is this: remember, it's an email, not a full blown website. You should not have as much CSS as you're describing in your emails to begin with. The more CSS the more chances there are for it to break. Images and tables are the way to go and you'd be surprised at how creative you can get under those constraints and how beautiful the result can be. Mo…
So, as someone who works with HTML emails all day long, do you have an evaluation of the "responsive email templates" in the OP? They seem to conflict with much of your advice to me. That's what I'm wondering about.
HTML emails in general are full of contradictions. I plan to use the templates myself and I'm really excited about them. To answer your question though, it's just important to realize that much of these techniques won't work in the majority of email clients. iOS and some Android built-in email clients are the ones that this will be great for. But at the same time you still have to inline the vast majority of your CSS to get a consistent result in webmail clients.
In the end you have to know your audience. At my job, we have a lot of corporate types who are checking their emails in Outlook and also webmail so the emails I create have only two style rules in the head of the document with the rest inlined. Email is just really fragile and I personally believe you have to resign yourself to the fact that your email will break for some of your readers. When I create a website I expect it to work beautifully for over 95% of people. With email, I expect it to work 3/4 of the time. Maybe more if I'm lucky. That of course depends on the complexity of the email's design of course.
Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
what do you mean? it's all in 'saved'. btw try https://bitbucket.org/zalew/hackernews if you want to crawl it to save elsewhere.
If you click on your own name and then click on "saved stories", in theory it shows you stories you upvoted. Mine is currently blank: http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=Mz I have seen others report problems as well. So I don't rely on that supposed feature.
I noticed today that my submitted stories page shows upvote arrows for my older submissions (as if I hadn't upvoted/submitted them). Only the 20 first ones have the red asterisk. And my saved stories page does not show old stories.
So it's not just me. Just to make sure, you know that link only works for yourself, each user can only see his own saved stories page.
Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you click on your own name and then click on "saved stories", in theory it shows you stories you upvoted. Mine is currently blank: http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=Mz I have seen others report problems as well. So I don't rely on that supposed feature.
I noticed today that my submitted stories page shows upvote arrows for my older submissions (as if I hadn't upvoted/submitted them). Only the 20 first ones have the red asterisk. And my saved stories page does not show old stories. So it's not just me. Just to make sure, you know that link only works for yourself, each user can only see his own saved stories page.
Thanks.
Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did some A/B testing on this a few years ago and found that HTML email had a better response rate for me. My methodology wasn't perfect, but I shared the results on my blog anyway: http://www.onlineaspect.com/2008/01/25/the-value-of-split-te...
That was 4 years ago. Things change way too fast for your sampling to remain relevant for this long.
troll elsewhere
Re: Show HN: Responsive Email Templates
#96If you are sending emails to business clients support for Outlook 2000-2003 & Outlook 2007 is still essential. I'm afraid you need to code them like it's 1999. MailChimp have a guide on how to do it right: http://mailchimp.com/resources/guides/email-jitsu/ Fortunately a is (and always has been) responsive. For non-business clients (who would be unlikely to use Outlook at all) these look great.
100% agree. Outlook doesn't support responsive CSS... but doesn't it support conditional comments? I think Zurb might be missing an opportunity here.