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Why does email development have to suck? – Explaining all the 's and 's

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Re: Why does email development have to suck? – Explaining all the <tr>'s and <td>'s

#41
post #27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pleasantly surprised that amazon actually sends plain text emails. Pretty much every other corporation insists on HTML mails.

I just checked, and they don't. It's certainly plain looking and without fancy styling/formatting, but they do send content-type text/html. The links and tracking pixel images are why they need HTML, I guess.

Mine have the text/plain header. I must have checked that setting like the sibling commenter said.

Re: Why does email development have to suck? – Explaining all the <tr>'s and <td>'s

#42
post #27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pleasantly surprised that amazon actually sends plain text emails. Pretty much every other corporation insists on HTML mails.

I just checked, and they don't. It's certainly plain looking and without fancy styling/formatting, but they do send content-type text/html. The links and tracking pixel images are why they need HTML, I guess.

Tracking pixel in an email? I thought nobody had done that in decades because major webmail clients pre-cache all images to prevent leaking user IP etc.

Re: Why does email development have to suck? – Explaining all the <tr>'s and <td>'s

#44

I don't understand the insistence on building "beautiful" emails. I'm not the kind of person to insist on text-only e-mail, but I do think it's ridiculous to spend lots of time and money making e-mails that look like fully-fledged Web documents. 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…

There's no chance a business today can work with plain text documents at scale. Virtually all email clients support html since a decade and the expectations user have todays have changed. To put it differently, it looks unprofessional.

To add to this, plaintext emails are a much bigger avenue for phishing, MITM attacks, and scammers.

Especially when dealing with technology, consistent branding actually has an important safety factor for consumers.

Re: Why does email development have to suck? – Explaining all the <tr>'s and <td>'s

#45
post #39
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked, and they don't. It's certainly plain looking and without fancy styling/formatting, but they do send content-type text/html. The links and tracking pixel images are why they need HTML, I guess.

This appears to be untrue. I looked at all the amazon emails in my inbox and they are all: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Did you actually scroll through all the way? Some emails send both plain text and HTML. I looked through mine and indeed saw text/html for most Amazon emails (including AWS). Some AWS emails like ACM cert renewals were text/plain. Though like someone else said here, you may have changed a setting in your account preferences. The default is still HTML.

    ------=_Part_4161549_398020174.1685704999675
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Re: Why does email development have to suck? – Explaining all the <tr>'s and <td>'s

#46
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get the end result by automation alone but you could automate half of it. 1) Use AppScript from google to find those. 2) Save all the links. 3) Go through them manually (because each service will want you to confirm you did not click by mistake).

Virus scanners and other tools like google will fetch any urls in emails to check their target. So having a direct unsubscribe action behind GET of a link breaks your email list as Gmail will unsubscribe everyone

Is this why they always have a confirm button? That's been a pet-peeve annoyance of mine.

Re: Why does email development have to suck? – Explaining all the <tr>'s and <td>'s

#47

Text. Just use damn text. Nobody wants to look at your logo. Why biz people have to ruin everything.

The clients also need to focus on this. Apple Mail on iOS uses plain text variant to show snippets, but if you try to expand the email, it only supports HTML, without a fallback to plain text. This is often the case on slow internet.

Re: Why does email development have to suck? – Explaining all the <tr>'s and <td>'s

#48
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get the end result by automation alone but you could automate half of it. 1) Use AppScript from google to find those. 2) Save all the links. 3) Go through them manually (because each service will want you to confirm you did not click by mistake).

Virus scanners and other tools like google will fetch any urls in emails to check their target. So having a direct unsubscribe action behind GET of a link breaks your email list as Gmail will unsubscribe everyone

There must be some additional logic behind that, because I see this regularly behind GET requests and I'm not being unsubscribed from everything.

Re: Why does email development have to suck? – Explaining all the <tr>'s and <td>'s

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, spam.

Is transactional email spam?

Well, that depends. Is it something I need to see? Did I proactively ask for it, or did I neglect to opt out? Etc, etc. If you are having to measure response rate, and it doesn't involve an emergency alert or some such, it is probably spam.

Re: Why does email development have to suck? – Explaining all the <tr>'s and <td>'s

#50
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked, and they don't. It's certainly plain looking and without fancy styling/formatting, but they do send content-type text/html. The links and tracking pixel images are why they need HTML, I guess.

Tracking pixel in an email? I thought nobody had done that in decades because major webmail clients pre-cache all images to prevent leaking user IP etc.

I don't know about decades. It's true that a lot of clients do that nowadays, but they're definitely still used.
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