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Comment by uean | Hacker News Reader

I love the analysis. But I hate that the 'fixed' email ends up being wordier for no reason at all.

Brevity has value. Having to bloat content (an email to get past anti-spam; a cooking blog to rank better within Google SEO; ...) brings back memories of high-school english papers, or the modern equivalent ChatGPT.

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100% agree, I also hate that I had to do this.

Couldn’t you add some “hidden” text instead, e.g. white on white or display:none?

I could but I don't want to, it's even more of a dark pattern and looks way too "spammish" IMO. I don't want my users to find this in their email and think that I'm trying to trick their system. Also I wouldn't be suprised if some antispam tries to detect this as a spam criteria.

Another piece of feedback: the link doesn’t look like a link any more. It wasn’t great before, but the verbiage made it adequately clear. But now it’s terrible, because the wording doesn’t suggest an action, and it doesn’t look like a link or a button. You should either restore its underline and lean into “link”, or give a background colour or (generally better) gradient and lean into “button”. But when it’s just a border, it doesn’t look like a button, especially when there’s a tick after it. And change the wording again.

Thanks for this feedback, I actually changed this because some of my clients complained of the opposite, that the link was a bit too "dim" and didn't look like the the obvious Call To Action in the email. But it's all very debatable I agree and I may change this again in the future.

The link style wasn’t great before, just darker black with a faint underline. For best results, links should be underlined blue.

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