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Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

caniemail.com

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Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#121

Post by luckman212 »

brongondwana wrote: post #86
wrycoder wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife has a fastmail account, but she uses her iMail client, so she can send inline photos with her email. Even FM can’t do that yet.

Huh? You can paste if you have an image in your buffer, or drag-drop image files into an email in the Fastmail composer. I paste images into emails from screenshots almost every day. (I'll take this report as a "we need to make it clearer you can do this!")

Very happy Fastmail user here! Would love if images could be resized in the webapp. For some reason most screenshots I paste in get scaled up to a very unwieldy size.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#122

Post by junon »

morgunkorn wrote: post #108

Hilarious anecdote about this website: the owner once said there are tons of entries in the usage log of people misunderstanding the purpose of the website and inputting celebrities names to try to email them. :D

I wish there was a database of some sort for these sorts of anecdotes!

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#123

Post by nox101 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #12

IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.

This reads me as "I prefer letters" or "I prefer fax"

HTML is what non-techies want, or rather, they want to insert pictures and videos directly inline. They want to bold and highlight. They want bullet lists and numbered lists. They want to change fonts, make headlines, etc.. And they want it all to reflow for their device.

I do to. I don't want to say in the 70s terminal. I get that lots of techies wish the world was still 80 column monochrome ASCII only but you're the exception.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#124

Post by lelanthran »

candiddevmike wrote: post #12

IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.

> IMO, HTML was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content is the best content.

Your first statement might be true (it's debatable). Your second is definitely false.

Lets assume that HTML really was the worst thing that ever happened to email. Plain text content for email is still not the best content.

People want to:

1. Click on a link in the email, not fumble with copy and paste on their phone.

2. See decently formatted paragraphs and content with bold, italics and different font sizes for headings and paragraphs, not a wall of text.

3. See images in the email itself, not have to once again fumble around with copy and paste.

4. Correctly formatted bullet points, including sub-lists.

For all of the above, some sort of format is required. If we exclude HTML as a possibility, you're still going to have to need a format of some type, because the wall-o-text format is not a good UI.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#125

Post by kcrwfrd_ »

Dark mode support in email is one of the most frustrating things I’ve dealt with as a frontend dev who’s been coding since the IE6 days.

Basically you have to accept that you must only implement a light mode design and choose colors that will look okay when automatically inverted by all of the shoddy dark mode email client implementations.

Gmail is one of the worst offenders. You have zero recourse for picking your own colors for dark mode.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#126

Post by yau8edq12i »

throw0101c wrote: post #67
StableAlkyne wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a completely valid opinion, and I prefer plaintext as well But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics. Personally, I'm just glad that email is a flexible enough medium to allow that. It's better than the alternative, where people moved to some closed, proprietary protocol behind like 20 patents that allows the same thing. Is there any other co…

> But at this point, it's pretty clear that most non-technical people prefer emails with fancy text and graphics. And what percentage of e-mails from people / human beings have those things? Certainly marketing e-mails have fancy formats, but I've rarely seen any person at a companies I've worked at use any kind of formatting: generally most folks hit reply and start typing with whatever the default is. Hardly any it…

You must be joking. I write and receive emails containing lists, hyperlinks, or blockquotes all the time. I don't need the last flexbox technology, but some formatting is important.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#127

Post by darekkay »

dabber wrote: post #101
ryanbigg wrote: post #66

What an excellent resource! (And yes Outlook is a pain and supports so very little!) We've tried building email templates for notifications for our apps where I work, and it has typically been a pain. We have since swapped to using mjml ( https://mjml.io/ ) to build the templates, and it's working wonders. The output seems the be the most compatible with all different devices that we've tested on. The other tool we e…

mjml looks really interesting, thanks for sharing. I wish there was a business reason for orgs to care about accessable and machine readable (I guess OCR is a thing now but still) emails. I've been using Foundation for Emails[1] for the very small number of emails that I've worked on which required more than just a list of img tags, and I really appreciate it for existing because HTML emails have been stuck in ie6 we…

> I wish there was a business reason for orgs to care about accessable and machine readable emails.

I hope the upcoming EU Accessibility Act will be enough for many organizations to finally make their emails accessible. I disable images by default in my email client, and some emails are pretty much empty without them, without providing any alternative.

Re: Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content

#129

Post by mykehunt »

MJML is better than most but remember every templating language has a footprint.

When possible reduce your html code weight to the bare bones minimum. Nothing too fancy. Keep it logical. After a bit of practice it’s actually easy and in my opinion often faster than MJML (For example MailJet. Don’t even get me started on Klaviyo.)

Even with minimal coding/hmtl experience you can run your code through GPT-4/Bard.

Bonus for including custom instructions such as “transactional intent”, Bayesian/heuristic filtering, coded for users with poor digital accessibility, under-served internet users, etc.

Even with the best domain domain/ip reputation without a positive engagement history specific to that user you will often land in promotions/other tab and not the primary tab for new users with a heavily weighted creative.

Remember you want to mimic “an email from Grandma” while maintaining some degree of control of visual design.

Or if that’s too complicated just keep your subject line under three words and all lowercase.

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