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Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)

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Re: Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)

#111
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (not the ones I use for important things like banks) Why is why this works, if you have a seperate email account for people, you can then check the email account for companies once a day without missing anything. IMO, it's a great compromise allowing for connectivity without dealing with junk.

I disagree. Instead of partitioning with rules and filters, you're partitioning with accounts. It's less granular. It's not like the two accounts method is going to eliminate problems of false positives and false negatives. It just means you have two accounts to manage.

It's more granular as all companys that use my private email address are a bad actors.

I am essentially adding one bit of information to every email.

Re: Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)

#112
"The trouble with text-only email"

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/735973/17bdb163fddd41ae/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15478546

Tracking users via email is such a lucrative business, we would need hundreds if not more of these blog posts to even make a small dent in the mindshare that HTML email has captured. How many phishing attacks rely on HTML email? All of them?

Re: Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)

#113

I have had a job where they tried to implement emails 4 times. The last attempt is still ongoing and in my opinion destined to fail. They wanted to implement few dozen of auto generated emails with huge content. The task was suspended 3 times, always because of the same thing: cost. Its insanely costly and hard to make a good looking cross platform email. After every suspension there were new design changes to implem…

The day mail clients start supporting Javascript is the day I check out and go live in a cabin.

Re: Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)

#114
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when websites started to make advertisements that look like articles? How long did it take you to learn what was an ad and what is a legitimate article?

I'm not sure I have, yet. :(

I think this is the safest assumption. (@_@)

Re: Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)

#115
Bad aesthetics and non-existent information architecture of visually obsessed people are unskillful detractions from credible calls to action. Even church and restaurant sites make actionable perusal difficult much less parking an event or registration in a calendar app easily.

Splashing colors, fonts and pictures around free text is not marketing. The prevalent transactional design SOP over the last few decades was A/B's on "pig lipstick" for customers often not capable of judging possibly good outcomes. We suffered (and sold) multiple delusions of "portals" and "destination sites" only imagining their own immersive relevance to customer gazes. Those who did better or avoided over investment were exceptionally wise.

We have years and decades to clean up the Web dump from inoperative airbrushing at most local or broad market service reaches. I don't know who teaches real decision support based information architecture for commercial markets. We have data now on what works and what does not with requisite methods and metrics. Someone might fill a gaping niche.

Re: Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)

#116

I was turned on to “no design” newsletters by Jeff Bezos’ updates on Blue Origin. They read and feel like a personal note from him, even though I know I’m just an entry on a big list. Since then, I’ve made all important announcements to my company’s customers via this “personal”, no-design style. The reply-to is my direct email address, which I think deepens the personal touch of this style, and prevents me from abus…

I have similar anecdata. I have an email list at work for my company’s dealers. When I sent a “service bulletin” formatted as a plaintext email I got much more engagement as judged by the actual replies to that email.

I agree that in certain cases this method is a clear winner.

Re: Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)

#117
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (not the ones I use for important things like banks) Why is why this works, if you have a seperate email account for people, you can then check the email account for companies once a day without missing anything. IMO, it's a great compromise allowing for connectivity without dealing with junk.

I disagree. Instead of partitioning with rules and filters, you're partitioning with accounts. It's less granular. It's not like the two accounts method is going to eliminate problems of false positives and false negatives. It just means you have two accounts to manage.

You both missed the trick. I could have been more clear in my description. It isn't two accounts to manage - it is (counted just now) 131 addresses. To the vast majority of those addresses, there is exactly one legitimate sender. I've started thinking of them as revokable leases on my inbox.

Setup for a new address is one line in my config management and takes less time to create than a filter in Gmail. There are other benefits, two of which being that it is easy to completely turn off someone who won't stop spamming, and it makes it obvious who is selling your address to whom.

Of course, you need a mail server and a domain, so it isn't for everyone. But this scheme has made it so much easier to control my email.

Re: Plain emails not only save time but work better (2016)

#120
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I worked on it for a bit and i can assure you email clients are the biggest shit. All the complaints you listed are features in my book. The only problem is that they even allow what they do.

You will never convince me that Microsoft rendering HTML using the MS Word engine is a feature.

I had nightmares about this during the project. I am not even joking.
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