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Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

But do they really? Most those "nicely designed" emails, to be honest, are spam. Either outright spam, like v14g4 and p3n1s pills (modern mail systems deal with those well enough), or only slightly more respectable spam like "you bought in our store once, so now we will hound you forever with ads for our good and services that you don't need anymore".

Among this sea of garbage, there are rare islands of useful updates - like genuine newsletters I subscribed to, or email from my doctor about test results, or reminder from my bank that they are going to deduct that car payment, whether I like it or not, so there better be money there, etc. And of course Amazon shipping notifications! If all those need any HTML, then only the most rudimentary one.

Of course, if you asked a user whether they'd want to get ugly marketing spam or beautiful one, I guess they'd choose the beautiful one. But that's not the right thing to ask.

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This is absolutely not my experience. Spam uses HTML formatting, sure, but it's not "nicely designed".

"Nicely designed" emails are things like flight confirmations, invoices, shipping notices, and that kind of transactional email. The common thread is that some entity with Real Money To Spend on a graphic designer is sending a (usually form) email to lots of people. Most spam outfits do not have those kinds of resources, especially since they need to change up their emails constantly to avoid spam filters.

The closest I would say that the "pretty" stuff gets to spam is newsletters and particularly political fundraising emails; I'm on a lot of political party lists after spending copious college free time working on campaigns.

The common thread about those non-spam transactional e-mails you mention is also that they're usually barely above plaintext. They usually contain some minimally styled table, and some of the company colors. Maybe their logo somewhere. That's in stark contrast from the spam these same companies send, which is where all that "Real Money To Spend on a graphic designer" goes. Compare e.g. the spam PayPal sends you vs. the e-mails confirming payments you've made. In my experience, this is pretty universal.

And speaking of universal heuristic, in my experience, the quality and relevance of content is strongly inversely correlated with the quality of design. The prettiest websites out there are ones that deliver negative value. The best designed (according to modern trends) user interfaces are the ones with worst ergonomy, wasting user time the most.

And yes, the subset of spam that's most recognized - ED pills, reproductive organ enlargement, members of royalty looking for help managing their finances - they tend to be very simply designed. But their distinguishing feature isn't simplicity of design. It's the carelessness. Typos, bad grammar, highly visible formatting mistakes, etc. When, on occasion, one of that "old school" spam messages tries to pose as a legit transactional e-mail, you can see through the deception by noticing the carelessness in replicating the design of the company being impersonated.

> And speaking of universal heuristic, in my experience, the quality and relevance of content is strongly inversely correlated with the quality of design. The prettiest websites out there are ones that deliver negative value. The best designed (according to modern trends) user interfaces are the ones with worst ergonomy, wasting user time the most.

This is just plain untrue, and seems to color your impression of email as well. See e.g. Delta vs Southwest (more polished look is more ergonomic site/app), or New Relic vs Datadog public-facing sites (indistinguishable in "quality" of the design, for competing products where IMO Datadog is better).

What are some examples that put the inverse correlation in your mind?

V1gr4 spam isn't nicely designed, but marketing we-arent-really-spam-because-we-have-unsubscribe-link spam - surely is. That includes political marketing too, of course, selling politicians is just another form of selling.

> Most those "nicely designed" emails, to be honest, are spam.

Indeed. The number of HTML elements in an email scales pretty linearly with the probability of it being spam.

Plain text is almost 100% certain not spam.

My experience is opposite. I have never received a scam email with HTML, is always plaintext that tried to mimic a regular conversation.

You must have a hell of a spam filter.

A quick scan of my inbox and spam folders would refute this

I just looked through my Junk folder and it took me about 30 seconds to find an email that was sent as plain text. Most of this time was spent digging through Mail's menus to figure out how to show the raw message.

I'm pretty sure that this comment was sarcasm

Unless it's from a Nigerian prince.

That is completely antithetical to my experience as mail server operator and someone who gets a lot of spam.

Nearly 100% of spam is plaintext, a small fraction uses badly designed HTML that barely displays in the client.

This may come down to whether you consider marketing email from legitimate businesses to be "spam" or if you reserve the term for the more scammy/seedy type of mail.

I unsubscribe from marketing mails, those are legally required to have an unsubscribe link in them. You should try clicking on that if you don't like marketing mail. If they don't stop you can threaten legal action in both EU and US without issue.

If it doesn't have this link, it's spam. If it's trying to get me to buy something I didn't explicitly wishlist on a store, it's spam. If it's unsolicited marketing, it's spam.

And even if I were to include all marketing email, including those I am interested in, then plaintext mail would still constitute the majority of spam mails I receive.

Any unsolicited marketing is spam, unsubscribe link or not.

That's... what I said. I mentioned the unsubscribe link for solicited marketing mails, where that is in fact relevant. Unsolicited email would be pretty damn illegal in my home country to begin with (and a GDPR violation).

It is illegal but very common. Many of those emails with unsubscribe links are unsolicited. They either spam all their former customers no matter if they have opted in or not or they just buy links. Yes, the unsubscribe links work but what they do is in obvious violation if the gdpr and other laws.

I have a feeling that they are, in fact, solicited. There’ll be fine print and a checkbox somewhere

Tricked into subscription with dark patterns is not quite the same as soliciting.

Very few companies would risk those lawsuits, especially in Europe the fines can get rather exponential for repeat violators and I don't think it's much different in the US either. If the unsubscribe works, that is the end of the story for me, and a reminder to check for small newsletter checkboxes when signing up to things.

I very rarely get marketing mails from any reputable company that are completely unsolicited. In most cases it's a followup from trying out an offering or updates to products I'm using or are adjacent to those. If I'm not interested, I either ignore them or unsubscribe if it's repeatedly not interesting.

This is a much more effective "spam" strategy compared to "all HTML is spam".

I personally found out that it's easier and faster to train my spam filter to move these mails into the spam folder. (I'm using claws-mail with bogofilter, which works quite well.)

Whenever I have to interact with a company, I check the spam folder for their replies.

The majority of mails in my spam folder is html mail.

The majority of mails in my spam folder is plaintext mail. Second place are the extremely malformed HTML mails. Almost any wellformed HTML mail I receive is solicited at minimum.

I can recommend using the unsubscribe link if you forgot to uncheck the newsletter checkbox during registration. Alternatively send them a mail to A) remind them of the SPAM-CAN act or your local equivalent legislation and B) that they should delete your mail from the newsletter. That works almost always, if not you can always threaten legal action (where I live, that's an easy 600€ of profit in a courtroom).

It's safer as well. Some (most?) of those "unsubscribe" links have a unique ID hooked in with your email in some database so they know that they have a hit and can send more email to you.

Well, they need something to be able to tell which email to remove from their DB too.

Not all is as sinister as it looks.

The simply solution is to just can any senders that don't respond to unsubscribe requests. But those will be just as bad in plaintext as in HTML, so I don't see why Plaintext means it's not spam, they can do the same thing Plaintext.

Spam sent to different domains (especially in different TLD) tends to be different so experience can be different.

In my observations badly formatted spam exists, but have big intersection with the spam which is relatively easy to filter out. Nicely formatted HTML spam on other hand is hard to filter because the only difference with legitimate marketing email is lack of any consent from the sender. Sure I can hit an unsubscribe link and my be never will get spam from the same domain again, but spammer will know that this email is active and will include the address in spam send on behalf of other customers.

Well, that is where the line of solicited and unsolicited mails fall, spammers are generally unsolicited (so no previous mail address confirmation), their unsubscribe links won't work and >90% of them are plaintext with the remainder having bad or illformed HTML. 99.8% of marketing mails I get have an unsubscribe link that works because it forgot to uncheck the newsletter when signing up, those are not an issue. And those are usually HTML mails with well formed formatting.

I run an email forwarding service[1] so I deal with spam a lot.

Spam usually has bad formating, mixed charset, old/broken layoyt etc.

Most of time, spam are odd designs. Example they only have HTML and didn't have the corresponding plain text part. They have large pictures and too little text, they have many "invisible" part so that hide behind element to trick you to click the wrong thing.

Even in plain-text, spam tend to include random links, very long text, weird chracter etc

A nicely design, or a plain-text emails(only plain text) with nice format all are good signal of non-spam.

In other word, consistency is signal of non-spam emails. But sometime marketing emails-which you never explicitly subscribe to, you just register for an account and got marketing emails, can also be consider spam, but from google/hotmail point of view they don't consider these are spam and that's reason they have Promotion tab to put thing in there

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[1] https://hanami.run

yes, they do

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