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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

#101

Post by marpstar »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #91
cypressious wrote: post #90

Last time I had to deal with emails, I've used https://mjml.io/ and was very happy with it. You can version the templates, compile them as part of your build pipeline and it seems to do produce very _adequate_ HTML full of tables that looks good on all clients that we tested.

How’s responsive design with mjml? Creating precise multi column responsive designs that work both in outlook and sane email clients is a nightmare.

I've been using MJML for a few years now, I can't imagine even trying to build a responsive email without it. I don't even have to think about it.

You may still have to slice images, but it's grid/column support has worked great for me.

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

#102

Post by pvorb »

hdodov wrote: post #74
pvorb wrote: post #53

Wouldn't most of these pains go away if you simply could include style tags (not attributes) in the body? I've always wondered why it's possible to include script tags pretty much everywhere but not style tags.

Nope, that doesn't work as well. I tested it before finishing up the article a few days ago. If you put ` ` in the ` `, it gets removed when the email is forwarded and it still looks like shit.

That's why I said "if you could". I know it's not valid HTML. For some reason, style tags are only allowed inside the . My point was that I find it strange that HTML in general has this limit and that script tags are allowed in the as well.

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

#103

Post by cosmodisk »

nottheengineer wrote: post #97

As an ABAP developer, I thought "that doesn't sound too bad". I definitely need to get out of there before my brain rots further. And for anyone curious: https://help.sap.com/doc/abapdocu_751_index_htm/7.51/en-us/a... Those are the keywords, about a third of that list is obsolete and you usually need multiple of them to make a valid statement. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

That's why I never saw any SAP job paying peanuts...

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

#104

Post by cosmodisk »

blowski wrote: post #10
NoraCodes wrote: post #7

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…

Perhaps that is your response, but it’s not true of everybody. I’ve done a lot of experiments with different types of email, and beautiful emails always get significantly better response rates.

Beautiful emails are easy. Emails with well conveyed and informative text- much much harder.

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

#105

Post by hyperman1 »

nottheengineer wrote: post #97

As an ABAP developer, I thought "that doesn't sound too bad". I definitely need to get out of there before my brain rots further. And for anyone curious: https://help.sap.com/doc/abapdocu_751_index_htm/7.51/en-us/a... Those are the keywords, about a third of that list is obsolete and you usually need multiple of them to make a valid statement. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I love how the numbers 1 to 7 are keywords and 8 and 9 aren't.

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

#106

Post by hyperman1 »

rossdavidh wrote: post #83
thiht wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow so clever. That totally solves the need to show logos and images, colors, formatting, centering things, making things visually appealing, etc. Can you conceive your needs and your basic understanding of an issue is not, in fact, the whole thing?

There is no "need" to show logos and images, etc. etc. In fact, far from making things visually appealing, all of that tells me (and most other people) "this is an email which I can safely delete without reading", precisely because real people not trying to sell you something rarely do that.

I believe there is a human need for images, but also that only text is still capable of creating a lot more than you'd expect.

When email was monospace text, the whole ASCII art thing was glorious. People added ANSI escape codes and gave us e.g. the glowing, blinking Chernobyl cows, in plain email. I also remember seeing a giant ASCII art 'high-res' nude somewhere, intended to be printed on a matrix printer, on 5 or 6 pages of continuous paper (Long-legged she was.)

Writing this, I wonder what desperate marketing attention whores would produce with ASCII art.

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

#107

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

marssaxman wrote: post #96
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Yes, normal people who don’t read HN have less trust in a plaintext email. 2. Yes, abandonment will be higher if the user can’t click the password reset link in the email.

> less trust in a plaintext email What a remarkable idea! "HTML mail = useless bullshit" is such a strong correlation in my mind that it had never occurred to me other people might see it the opposite way.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm.

Personally, I've been using mutt in the terminal as my primary email client for several years, and I absolutely prefer plaintext email.

But this isn't about me. Nor is it about any other computer nerd here clutching their pearls over HTML email. The reality is that users of web applications — the kind that probably a significant proportion of HN readers develop to earn a living — expect HTML transactional email.

It's table stakes. That's just the reality.

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

#108

Post by toast0 »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #99
toast0 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can certainly put urls into a text/plain email. It helps if your urls aren't terribly long and don't have characters that are questionable in urls. w3c suggests surrounding them with angle brackets [1], but I can't find a source that makes more than a suggestion. By reports, some mail user agents, and some users will include the trailing > in the url they provide to their web user-agent, so that's something to co…

Yes, you can put them in there, but then you're relying on the recipient's client to turn that plaintext url into a link the recipient can actually click on, as opposed to having to copy and paste the url into their browser address bar. Right? Or do I have something wrong?

Yeah, but most email clients do linkify urls in text/plain emails. Heck, an awful lot of email clients linkify urls in text/html emails.

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

#109

Post by marssaxman »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #107
marssaxman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> less trust in a plaintext email What a remarkable idea! "HTML mail = useless bullshit" is such a strong correlation in my mind that it had never occurred to me other people might see it the opposite way.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Personally, I've been using mutt in the terminal as my primary email client for several years, and I absolutely prefer plaintext email. But this isn't about me. Nor is it about any other computer nerd here clutching their pearls over HTML email. The reality is that users of web applications — the kind that probably a significant proportion of HN readers develop to earn a living — expe…

Not sarcasm at all.

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

#110

Post by unethical_ban »

dsr_ wrote: post #52
epolanski wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is nothing in the average internal email that requires HTML, much less CSS. There is nothing in the average external email that requires HTML or CSS. There is no useful content in any email that requires JavaScript. "looks unprofessional" is cultural, and of the same significance as green vs blue text bubbles in your SMS messaging system.

Some people want marketing emails. Did you know some people sign up for them voluntarily? They're like newsletters of old, but electronic. And it arrives in your mailbox, ready to be rendered!

Furthermore, many emails are direct links to status pages of orders, account verifications, password resets, and so on, which are definitely most functional as a clickable URL.

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