Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by jandrese » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 3:52 PM UTC

matharmin wrote: post #34

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.

Markdown is nice for composing, but not as a standard to be supported by many clients. CommonMark is an improvement, but there is way to many ambiguities and differences in supported features over different markdown parsers for it to be feasibly used as a standard. Markdown is also not any better than HTML in terms of security - most markdown parsers allow passing through arbitrary HTML, and then depend on sanitizing…

This is a bigger issue than most people care to admit. I post stuff to a number of different sites that support "Markdown" and not a single one agrees on even something a simple as how to format a hyperlink. I end up having to hit the help page on every site to remember which syntax they use, if they even support the feature at all. HTML might be "ugly", but at least it is consistent.

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

#132

Post by smacktoward » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

alberth wrote: post #128

grenoire wrote: post #9

Christ on a bike, the state of Outlook on Windows is absolutely miserable. I knew it by experience when I started preparing HTML signatures for our company, but seeing the list makes me even sadder about the absolute state of incompetency caused by legacy systems in Microsoft. For those uninformed, Outlook on Windows effectively works on a terrible (and terribly old) implementation of HTML that was initially develope…

I believe Outlook still uses the Microsoft Frontpage html engine. For those who don’t know, it’s was Microsoft WYSIWYG website builder that looked similar to Word, from 20 years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage

Nope, believe it or not, ever since Outlook 2007 it uses the HTML rendering engine from Word itself. Seriously! Someone at Microsoft looked at Outlook and said "this needs to have the same rendering capabilities as noted Web browser Microsoft Word." Sheesh.

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

#133

Post by sitkack » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:15 PM UTC

Nooooo! More plain text and less html. If we need to, lets define a strict subset, lets call it html5-lite and it will only have a handful of tags and two css modes that are not user definable.

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

#134

Post by dehrmann » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

LeonM wrote: post #11

CSS in email clients is a mess. Like IE6 on steroids. I switched to a Windows on my work laptop about 6 months ago, and the native Win 10 email client is probably the worst offender out there. Even the popular mailing lists (like IH, PH, etc) are completely broken to the point of unreadable in Windows 10 Mail. Mailchimp has a pretty good guides on how to create cross-compatible layouts: https://templates.mailchimp.co…

Looks like they at least followed the IE pattern of having conditional comments. Embedding IE CSS hacks in one place (and possibly degrading the site) made working with IE almost tolerable.

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

#135

Post by ukyrgf » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:17 PM UTC

gondo wrote: post #33

I've used this guide to navigate email styling nightmare: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ And this tool to test emails before sending: https://litmus.com/

Campaign Monitor's documentation has been the go-to solution for years. But I'm sure everybody working with email HTML already knows about it.

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

#136

Post by zczc » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:20 PM UTC

aloisdg wrote: post #19

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.

Beside, I am using Markdown in all my email thanks to https://markdown-here.com/ and Thunderbird

The idea behind Markdown Here is good, but it has some issues like keeping a copy of the markup text base-encoded in some html attribute which can be lead to unintentionally leaking full text while forwarding part of the message.

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

#137

Post by usaphp » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

ndidi wrote: post #46

grenoire wrote: post #9

Christ on a bike, the state of Outlook on Windows is absolutely miserable. I knew it by experience when I started preparing HTML signatures for our company, but seeing the list makes me even sadder about the absolute state of incompetency caused by legacy systems in Microsoft. For those uninformed, Outlook on Windows effectively works on a terrible (and terribly old) implementation of HTML that was initially develope…

Everything that discourages designers from doing fancy things is good in my book.

By the same logic you could say that internet explorer was doing good things

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

#138

Post by ecf » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

grenoire wrote: post #9

Christ on a bike, the state of Outlook on Windows is absolutely miserable. I knew it by experience when I started preparing HTML signatures for our company, but seeing the list makes me even sadder about the absolute state of incompetency caused by legacy systems in Microsoft. For those uninformed, Outlook on Windows effectively works on a terrible (and terribly old) implementation of HTML that was initially develope…

Office for Windows still uses Internet Explorer as the renderer for addins built with OfficeJS, unless you're on Windows 1903 and using an insider version of Office.

I had depressed thoughts when I discovered I would be having to debug Internet Explorer in 2019.

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

#139

Post by andrei_says_ » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

sexy_seedbox wrote: post #81

Have been using Cerberus since 2016 for responsive emails with no issues: https://github.com/TedGoas/Cerberus

This is a gem. I created an in-house mail builder based on its styles.

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

#140

Post by ilikehurdles » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

Lxr wrote: post #7

Why use HTML in emails though?

HTML emails are a blessing. Receiving them allows me the ability to quickly glance at an email from an unexpected sender and immediately recognize it as a marketing email or cold sales, and send it to the spam folder without needing to read a single word.