Comments on: HTML Email Sucks

By: TJ Kelly

TJ Kelly — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:35:54 +0000

Brian – Thanks for the comment. I agree that measurement is a great advantage of html email. And UIE’s version of it is an example to be followed. Simple layout enhancements that make reading easier. The above example is just one of many that WAY over-do it.

By: Brian Christiansen

Brian Christiansen — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:23:46 +0000

I’m going to have to take a slightly different tact, here. It’s the support for HTML email in email clients that sucks. The use of visual style in emails is not inherently evil. In fact, I think one could make a pretty strong argument for visual style via HTML (ideally, via CSS) as a usability bonus… if the email clients of the world would just let WebKit do the rendering.

At UIE, we sent out plain text emails for a long, long time. We’ve just started using *very* simple HTML emails. First thing to note is the vast majority of people don’t even know what RSS is, let alone use it. Average web folk sign up for email newsletters when they want to know what’s new with a company. We had people asking for HTML email so that it would be easier to read with headers and such.

With HTML email, you can also measure response. We have *a lot* of people who’ve signed up for our list, http://www.uie.com/uietips/ and we really need to know if what we’re sending them, mostly research articles, is effective. Otherwise, we’re just clogging their inbox.

Now, that’s not to say that HTML is not abused by many, many senders. But, that’s a different argument. If the world would get on the standards wagon, we could move forward here.

By: Marc Amos

Marc Amos — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:16:41 +0000

Fred, I will stab you.

By: TJ Kelly

TJ Kelly — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:53:09 +0000

Tim, I feel your pain man, definitely.

Fred, Marc is clearly the best. And yes, 3rd field is website. JS error caused my labels to disappear. They’re back now.

By: Fred

Fred — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:44:34 +0000

(Also, what is the third field for in your comments? I feel like I guessed on Name and Email, hopefully those were right.)

By: Fred

Fred — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:43:51 +0000

Well yeah, Gmail is one of the worst email renderers out there; it’s worse than Outlook. But I agree with the idea. HTML emails should be either reallllly simple, or given to Marc Amos to code as he is just so darn good at them. :)

By: Timothy Haroutunian

Timothy Haroutunian — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:03:38 +0000

I will 150% agree with you. We have a client who sends out about 40 HTML emails per month (different websites and different mailing lists) and we have to “design” them all. They waste a ton of money to pay us to create them and the email never turns out the way the client wants them to. We try to explain this to them, but they don’t really want to listen. There are days I have to stay late at work just to make the client happy with how the email gets sent out.

“Move that image up and to the left a little”, “Can you make it so the text doesn’t wrap under the bullet?”, and my personal favorite, “Can you make that background image more transparent?”. The funny part about the background image one is that I have Office 2007 which doesn’t support background images so I have to waste my boss’s time just so he can check the email in 2003.

Why do people think that full scale HTML emails are the best way to display information? It makes my head hurt sometimes.