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Comment by ljp_206 | Hacker News Reader

I built HTML emails once upon a time - "in the trenches sending spam emails" is how I describe it. One can only send so many undesired trash missives that literally have no effect upon the physical world before you need an outlet. Woodworking allows me to use my skills, raw strength, and attention to detail to create things that look beautiful, are useful, and don't get deleted instantly.

I got out of HTML email a long time ago, thankfully.

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out of curiosity — since it sounds like you might have been working on promotional or unsolicited email — did you ever see responses from your emails?

i’ve been responding to marketing emails recently — often CC’ing generic accounts like marketing@company, help@company, etc to try to reach actual humans in the loop. the process has been fascinating to me and the number of (intentional or unintentional) choke-points makes me wonder if — even in the more enlightened organizations i’ve worked in — i could ever stand a chance of understanding our email campaigns, inside and out.

These were largely upsell emails to existing AT&T customers, and I was a designer/developer for a marketing agency, so I barely had anything to do with the sending. Think like the largest of the large; audiences in the millions.

So, no replies, but my grandmother got one of the emails my agency designed! That one made me feel queasy.

Apologies if what I said was misleading. That agency laid me and over a hundred coworkers off; hence no qualms about divulging our primary customer.

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