The Bare Bones Essential Checklist For Sending Solid Email | Hacker News Reader

The Bare Bones Essential Checklist For Sending Solid Email

sendicate.net

12 pointsevan26 comments

Thanks to Kevan from http://sendsmarter.co for the post. Definitely check out Send Smarter for great email tips.

Obligatory comment about how blech HTML e-mail (still) is.

Why is it any worse than HTML web sites? ;-P But seriously, doesn't it depend on the implementation just like everything else?

When someone sends me an e-mail, I want to read the message they've sent. I don't want their idiotic decision to render it in unreadable tiny blue lettering to factor in to this. I don't need a half-megabyte PNG showing me what their corporate logo looks like.

I don't want my mail client to have to rat me out to the sender when I open the message, just because their template depends on loading images from the web (apparently some mail clients now do this again by default? Madness!).

I don't want to parse the sender's message through a complex (and historically fragile) HTML parser just to give them the opportunity to make the message more difficult to read.

E-mail is about communicating a textual idea - the text is what matters. Let me decide how I want to render that so I can best digest it.

We (Sendicate) agree with your points. We have templates that automatically resize images, use readable fonts and colors, emphasize text and readability on mobile (even with multiple columns and dynamic layouts). We also automatically create a plain-text version without re-writing links for tracking. We have learnt from the mistakes of others and tried to solve the problems you describe. Email can be horrible, but it doesn't have to be.

The good news is that you can decide how to view your emails. For Apple Mail try running "defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool true"

Good on you for making an effort and thanks for the tip about Apple Mail. If only this was more widely known and/or available on iOS.

A viable text/plain part is extremely important - it means my MUA (http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/ is fantastic, btw) doesn't have to try and mangle down HTML in to something readable.

I would suggest just turning off the HTML part though, it's superfluous once you have a working text/plain 8^)

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