[tholman]

There are absolutely no standards at all when trying to code emails, it takes hours trying to make something that remotely resembles the same thing on every engine (Microsoft outlook rendering emails with their ms word engine, google doing all sorts of different things on desktops vs phones) - and hours more of testing and tweaking css and markup hacks to make them readable. Although this is another puzzle piece to scatter the landscape, I can’t say I’m against someone actually trying to lock some standards down on the email platform.

The counter is that we don’t need all the css and pizzazz in emails, but we’ve come too far to realistically go back on that.

[vanadium]

"Imagine you're building a site with one foot in 1999 and another foot in 2016, but instead of 4-5 browsers you have around 20 highly-idiosyncratic browsers past and present to deal with."

That's pretty much how I introduce people to email development, and AMP for email isn't going to solve for that in any meaningful way.

[swiley]

It’s a pain because no one wants it!

Emails are for text, if you have something to say you can write it out.

[javagram]

Except that html email is used because it works a lot better (i.e. people DO want it)

Try sending your marketing campaign as plain text and then try sending it as carefully crafted HTML mail. Unless your target is a specific small segment of users who love text/plain, HTML will do better and make you more money.

[simias]

I don't know what's the name of this phenomenon but it reminds me of bass-boosted stereos and over-saturated TV screens. Objectively, from a signal processing theory standpoint, it's not superior to a properly calibrated monitor. But subjectively it seems that we collectively like it when dynamics get crushed to loony-tunes levels.

I feel like HTML email is the same way. People think they want it, but in my experience it's an absolutely abysmal experience. Ever been forwarded one of these corporate-type emails where people reply all over the place, each using their own convention of color and typesetting and emphasis markers, with bits of "rich text" signatures and images littered throughout? That's a bloody terrible experience.

Not that plain text email can't be messy, but it's really a situation where less is more. People have to be a little more careful with what they're doing instead of saying "I'll just write this in neon pink and they'll get it".

As for marketing campaigns then yes, I grant you that you can make much more compelling content with more advanced technology but as far as I'm concerned that's cancer so I don't really care about that. I don't really get why anybody would opt into receiving what's effectively spam into their mailbox although maybe I'm wrong about that.

[Alex3917]

> Ever been forwarded one of these corporate-type emails where people reply all over the place, each using their own convention of color and typesetting and emphasis markers, with bits of "rich text" signatures and images littered throughout? That's a bloody terrible experience.

https://www.prettyfwd.com

Created to fix that exact issue.

[Fnoord]

Which is Gmail-only and therefore Google-only. I wouldn't want very sensitive corporate data hosted by Google, so this is a red flag for my use-case.

[Alex3917]

Fair. I’ll make an Outlook add-in also, I just haven’t gotten to it yet. I’ve already done the preliminary work to make the API agnostic though so it’s really just the UI lift.

[eikenberry]

If your argument for HTML email is spam, then I think you just defeated yourself.

[javagram]

“Spam” is unwanted mail, plenty of people opt into marketing emails for whatever reason. Just because you personally don’t like it doesn’t mean no one does.

[Alex3917]

When the author says the email protocol is easy it's a pretty big giveaway that they've never actually built anything involving email. Just getting email messages to display properly on the screen is many years of work.