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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.
Creating precise multi column responsive designs that work both in outlook and sane email clients is a nightmare.
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The clients also need to focus on this. Apple Mail on iOS uses plain text variant to show snippets, but if you try to expand the email, it only supports HTML, without a fallback to plain text. This is often the case on slow internet.
That isn’t true: Apple Mail is perfectly capable of showing plain-text-only messages.
Text. Just use damn text. Nobody wants to look at your logo. Why biz people have to ruin everything.
> Hey ${name},
> Our custom holographic stickers are on for on for ${deal}.
And that’s it. I bet they have awesome deliverability because it’s… just email.
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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.
This is an absurdly wrong, yet characteristically HN take. Transactional mail typically requires some hyperlink for the average user.
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 consider and make sure the destination of the link can handle.
Putting links on a line by themselves works well too.
If you don't know what a user prefers, it makes sense to send a text/plain with links as I've described, as well as a text/html with links in tags, because tagged links may be friendlier to some users and some mail user-agents are tragically bad at their job.
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The data I've seen suggests the opposite?
All of our internal tests have confirmed this, and even the email providers have more or less confirmed the same thing: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/plain-text-vs-html-emails...
Meaning the 'plain' text is Html-formatted to look plain and there are tracker links and probably tracking pixels too.
Real plain text should be just like something a human being typed.
Also, ignoring the general scamminess of hubspot, the linked article says html mail is MORE likely to be flagged as commercial. The article, in fact, is entirely pro plain text.
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OK. So what, I'm not going to complete my password reset notification because the page isn't beautiful? If you are tracking response rates it is because people aren't expecting an email, because they didn't ask for one (i.e. it isn't a password reset notification). GP is right - I want information I /need/ to be in an email in a succinct format, and I don't want emails I don't need.
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.
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 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.
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.
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This is an absurdly wrong, yet characteristically HN take. Transactional mail typically requires some hyperlink for the average user.
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…
Right? Or do I have something wrong?
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Low response rates are used as a spam signal by major email providers, whatever the type of email.
How does that make any sense when those are often sent from no-reply addresses that are routed nowhere?