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Comment by marban | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Written information clearly benefits from bold, italics, ordered and unordered lists, section headers, etc. Normal people don’t really understand text surrounded by underscores or asterisks (I never receive messages with those constructs from non-technical people).

Formatting lists or indented quotes (also common in “normal” email usage) using white spaces and other semi-arbitrary characters is tedious and brittle.

The “rich text” features of HTML email definitely improve readability and understanding when used with restraint.

It is useful to have a way to represent structural and semantic information in email text (paragraphs, headings, quotes etc.), but not custom layouts and styling — that should remain under full control of the reader.

Include an URL to any external content. All URLs are plaintext, ideally.

My 3845743985793847948 gigabyte Linux ISO. Is here, in email-contextual plain text: http:/linux.iso/3845743985793847948/gib

My xes tapes? All stored at this address http://xes.sepat/all

What's the problem. Email works. Without formatting.

I think images are used for marketing emails because spam filters are worse at detecting them.

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