[TheAceOfHearts]

There's a certain zen to going back to basics and using plaintext. It's always my default choice whenever I'm given the option.

I'd argue in most cases you really don't need any fancy styles and markup. Although upon writing this I'm now wondering if unstyled HTML might provide improved accessibility over plaintext. What are people's experiences on the matter?

Although I respect that some people may find greater value in carefully styled marketing emails, to me it just feels a bit overengineered at times. How many man-hours have been spent trying to get marketing emails to look the same across all major clients? Are slight variations really such a horrible thing?

As we're on the subject, I'll add the following suggestion to gmail users: go to Settings and changing the Images option to "Ask before displaying external images". External images are regularly abused to track if the email has been viewed, which I consider creepy.

[savanaly]

If nothing else, styling emails serves an economic purpose through facilitating signaling. The more a company expects that consumers will value it in the long run the more incentive it has to signal that fact, and a signal is only as good as it is expensive in appearance to the people being signaled to.

In this case, things like a marketing email or simply the follow-up email to signing up to some service provide that signal since the user can see how much effort was invested in making the communication look attractive.

[Spivak]

As a recipient of those emails -- not really. Clients block remote content by default and there's almost never a reason to load them, especially when they're used for tracking. Those 'pretty' emails will almost always look like a soup of image placeholders interspersed with text.

[andyjohnson0]

> External images are regularly abused to track if the email has been viewed, which I consider creepy.

My understanding was that external images are automatically fetched and cached on their servers by Google, so they can't be reliably used to track message views [1]. Has this changed?

[1] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

[scaasic]

AFAIK tracking images are usually sent via a recipient-unique URL, which allows services like Mailchimp to provide open stats for individuals. Since the URLs are unique, the host servers will get hit at least once per recipient that opens the email, as Google downloads and caches the image.

[ConfucianNardin]

That depends on how the fetching and caching is implemented. If it's done when you open your email, the tracking would still work. If the trigger is unrelated to anything correlating with your opening of the email it wouldn't.

It will still prevent the sender from setting cookies for you, or learning your IP and user agent.

[askvictor]

They are proxied by Google's servers, but not (necessarily) cached.

[hippich]

I am in the process of learning everything-marketing and sending my own emails from my own server using my own hosted software.

I can confirm that every time you open email, open is get tracked. (what is not get tracked is your IP/OS/etc)

So in fact Gmail made online marketers job easier.

[nailer]

> Although upon writing this I'm now wondering if unstyled HTML might provide improved accessibility over plaintext.

Yep. Email formatted for 65 to 78 monospaced characters with hard carriage returns (as per *nix mailing lists) look much worse on devices that are narrower or wider than this. HTML paragraphs don't have the problem.

[brians]

I think this is the problem format=flowed was created to solve. But it doesn’t seem to help. I wonder why it doesn’t have wider implementation