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Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

caniemail.com

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Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#101

Post by marpstar »

erichurkman wrote: post #98
gitgud wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's pretty cool, what's the consistency across different clients like? Having email rendered consistently across many email clients was the main reason we stayed with Mail Chimp for so long...

It's pretty good. A few clients are still PITA (looking at you, Outlook 2007 and Yahoo mail. You still have to do jump through hoops for accurate background images, or fancy things with borders. The actual markup MJML generates is terrifying, and can be very large payloads. A simple hero graphic, some styled body text, a few buttons, and a footer was around 60KB/message. It got gnarly for us as our MTA had a max-payl…

I agree with all of this. When you really start to dig in to cross-client compatibility (and you observe what MJML does to provide it) you start to get a sense that NOT using a tool like MJML is a hopeless path.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#102

Post by jcranmer »

sjwright wrote: post #88
jlokier wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the content isn't inline, perhaps it's better to have the mail server fetch it when the email is received, so that the sender can't track whether you are reading it. This has been discussed before with regard to external links to images. I think that always made sense, but it makes even more sense to do this when the core content is external. Then fetching it would be just another part of the SMTP/HTTP transaction…

Exactly. If most mail clients downloaded it automatically upon receipt instead of on view then the tracking benefits get diluted to the point of uselessness. (Actually, thinking further it would have to be done server side to avoid leaking your personal IP. For a webmail provider that’s obviously straightforward, while IMAP servers could be extended to automatically replace AMP email directives with a static HTML att…

So you want RFC 2017 basically?

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#103

Post by claar »

svat wrote: post #45
orf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you done any benchmarking on the sizes of the images? I cannot imagine a JPEG math expression, cached by google, is going to take an age to load when viewed in Gmail and not be that large.

That's a good question. The actual size of the images is not large: the problem is that I can visually see the email take a while to load properly, even for an email containing just two PNG images that are 2941 bytes and 6333 bytes respectively. If nearly every sentence were to be interrupted a few times with such delayed-loading images, the reading experience would be rather poor. (This was with the images self-cont…

Try embedding Base64 images in the email instead:

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#104

Post by pbhjpbhj »

other_herbert wrote: post #96
enraged_camel wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get it. Stuff like this does not discourage designers. It is what gets them jobs and keeps them employed. I've worked with marketing departments where it was a designer's primary job to make things look good on email campaigns.

I had a recent request from a product owner to style the subject line... I said we can't do that and that I don't want to live in a world where senders can change the font or size of the subject in an email.... Can you imagine the crap we would have from spam in that case?!

Y̗̳̬͍̘͚o͘u͏ ͏̬̟̩h̦̕a̰̖͍̟v̧̯̜͉͙̖͖͉e҉̳̲̙͚̗̬ ̤͚͉̀w̢̫͎̮̼͇o̷̮̙̩n̪͙͎̠͔ ̻̮a̛̭ ̡̪̤̻ͅp̵̭͇r̩͉į̬̺̭̯͍͙z̯͈͟e!͖̖͈̯

ie don't any mua let you use UTF8?

𝔻𝕠𝕖𝕤 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤 𝕨𝕠𝕣𝕜?

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#105

Post by buildzr »

other_herbert wrote: post #96
enraged_camel wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get it. Stuff like this does not discourage designers. It is what gets them jobs and keeps them employed. I've worked with marketing departments where it was a designer's primary job to make things look good on email campaigns.

I had a recent request from a product owner to style the subject line... I said we can't do that and that I don't want to live in a world where senders can change the font or size of the subject in an email.... Can you imagine the crap we would have from spam in that case?!

You can always pack it with emojis and unicode characters... that's what all the spammers seem to do at least.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#106

Post by mrweasel »

marban wrote: post #47

Anyone wanna chime in on conversion rates when it comes to styled vs. plain text? I always hear that the latter converts better, i.e. "Make it look like as if it was sent by a friend" and obviously it's a business related matter but I wonder why plain isn't used more often when visuals/emotion aren't the #1 selling points.

Thinking in terms of "conversion rates" feels to me like the reason why we're in this mess. Email to me isn't about conversion and advertising newsletters. It's about written information, so there's no reason to even support HTML, in most cases.

Arguably there's situation where an image will help in conveying information, or where a table will make information more readable. There's no situation where CSS is required.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#107

Post by DocTomoe »

tiborsaas wrote: post #61
_urga wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this? Hello ... ... Thanks!

HTML in email helps readability, titles, lists, tables does help the recipient.

Nothing that cannot more elegantly be solved by using MarkDown ...

... or common sense.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#108

Post by jcranmer »

ktpsns wrote: post #4

It would be really nice to have a small and simple markup language, say some markdown standard, to be the layouting language for E-Mails. No (external) images, just links, lists, headings, basic formatting. HTML E-Mails are a security nightmare, even if "only" CSS is "allowed" and JS/iframes/external images are not loaded.

You're basically advocating for text/richtext (aka text/enriched), which was originally proposed explicitly as a replacement for HTML in email. It failed essentially because everyone who didn't want HTML wanted only plain text, and everyone who wanted something like HTML was happy to just use HTML.

Factoid of the day: Netscape added support for a tag to text/enriched bodies, and that support remains in every client that's still using Netscape's MIME code. The comment above this code just says: "Of course, both text/richtext and text/enriched must be enhanced somehow... Or else what would people think."

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#109

Post by psimyn »

ktpsns wrote: post #16
gpvos wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like this? http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1896.txt

Thanks for the RFC link. Yes, basically. I mean, different mime versions of the same content are a possibility to do this transition: Send both plaintext, HTML and markdown, and the receiver could choose to display markdown if he otherwise would display plain text. To be honest, this won't come. Google is pushing AMP into mails, that's exactly the opposite direction.

Isn't AMP for email kinda what you are describing?

"The AMP version of the message is embedded into the email as a new MIME part, in addition to the HTML and plaintext, ensuring compatibility across all mail clients"

From https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/cre...

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