[NoraCodes]

I don't understand the insistence on building "beautiful" emails. I'm not the kind of person to insist on text-only e-mail, but I do think it's ridiculous to spend lots of time and money making e-mails that look like fully-fledged Web documents.

Either your message does have some useful information for the reader, in which case say that and then get out of my way, or it doesn't, in which case you're a spammer. There is no third option.

[blowski]

Perhaps that is your response, but it’s not true of everybody. I’ve done a lot of experiments with different types of email, and beautiful emails always get significantly better response rates.

[NoraCodes]

Ah. I think the difference is that when I send emails, I do so to communicate information, rather than to elicit people to buy a product.

[franga2000]

Even when communicating important information, using the company design has been the norm since graphic printing was invented. Even something as transactional as a bank statement or court summon will use the sending organization's logo, fonts and colors.

[yakshaving_jgt]

Are you relying on the user's email client to convert plaintext URIs into interactive hyperlinks in transactional mail?

[NoraCodes]

No. As I said, I'm not advocating for plain text only emails, just simple ones.

[cosmodisk]

Beautiful emails are easy. Emails with well conveyed and informative text- much much harder.

[LastTrain]

So, spam.

[yakshaving_jgt]

Is transactional email spam?

[LastTrain]

Well, that depends. Is it something I need to see? Did I proactively ask for it, or did I neglect to opt out? Etc, etc. If you are having to measure response rate, and it doesn't involve an emergency alert or some such, it is probably spam.

[yakshaving_jgt]

Transactional mail is not marketing mail.

It's typically a notification in response to an action you initiated on some web application.

https://postmarkapp.com/blog/what-is-transactional-email-and...

[LastTrain]

OK. So what, I'm not going to complete my password reset notification because the page isn't beautiful? If you are tracking response rates it is because people aren't expecting an email, because they didn't ask for one (i.e. it isn't a password reset notification). GP is right - I want information I /need/ to be in an email in a succinct format, and I don't want emails I don't need.

[seba_dos1]

How much sense does it make to measure and discuss response rates for transactional mails though?

[epolanski]

There's no chance a business today can work with plain text documents at scale.

Virtually all email clients support html since a decade and the expectations user have todays have changed.

To put it differently, it looks unprofessional.

[dsr_]

There is nothing in the average internal email that requires HTML, much less CSS.

There is nothing in the average external email that requires HTML or CSS.

There is no useful content in any email that requires JavaScript.

"looks unprofessional" is cultural, and of the same significance as green vs blue text bubbles in your SMS messaging system.

[yakshaving_jgt]

This is an absurdly wrong, yet characteristically HN take.

Transactional mail typically requires some hyperlink for the average user.

[dsr_]

No, it doesn't. Email is a great feedback medium.

"If you want to continue with the subscription, reply with the word YES on a line by itself. You can put comments on other lines and we will read them."

[e-mail] is one of the stupid innovations by people who can't automate their email. Transactional email gets handled by robots and fed into a ticketing system when it goes awry.

Treat your customers like customers, not consumers.

[thiht]

Now you need to deal with « yes », « Yes », « YES. », HTML wrapping, user signatures, dangling spaces, etc.

I’ve worked with a system that let users order domain names by email and it was a nightmare to maintain. Don’t EVER build a system that relies on reading and parsing emails sent by users, it WILL fail horribly.

[memefrog]

> Now you need to deal with « yes », « Yes », « YES. », HTML wrapping, user signatures, dangling spaces, etc.

Oh no, you need to find a line of text in a string that contains the word 'YES'. How incredibly difficult. Are you even a programmer? This is entirely trivial.

[JimDabell]

Transactional emails are things like reset password emails. You’re really going to build your reset password functionality by having people email their new password to you?

[yakshaving_jgt]

Why would transactional mail come from [e-mail]?

Transactional mail is not marketing mail.

It’s not a good look to declare things as stupid when you aren’t sure what the discussion is about.

[toast0]

You can certainly put urls into a text/plain email. It helps if your urls aren't terribly long and don't have characters that are questionable in urls.

w3c suggests surrounding them with angle brackets [1], but I can't find a source that makes more than a suggestion. By reports, some mail user agents, and some users will include the trailing > in the url they provide to their web user-agent, so that's something to consider and make sure the destination of the link can handle.

Putting links on a line by themselves works well too.

If you don't know what a user prefers, it makes sense to send a text/plain with links as I've described, as well as a text/html with links in tags, because tagged links may be friendlier to some users and some mail user-agents are tragically bad at their job.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/5.1_Wrappers.html

[yakshaving_jgt]

Yes, you can put them in there, but then you're relying on the recipient's client to turn that plaintext url into a link the recipient can actually click on, as opposed to having to copy and paste the url into their browser address bar.

Right? Or do I have something wrong?

[toast0]

Yeah, but most email clients do linkify urls in text/plain emails. Heck, an awful lot of email clients linkify urls in text/html emails.

[7952]

Why stop at just supporting the yhe average email though? Tables/embedded images/hyperlinks can be very useful for communication. I can send them without having to worry about platforms/software/SharePoint etc. It is by far the most reliable way of sending a simple, interoperable document we have. And you can easily refer back to it later. There is no good reason not to use html for communication between actual people.

[unethical_ban]

Some people want marketing emails. Did you know some people sign up for them voluntarily? They're like newsletters of old, but electronic. And it arrives in your mailbox, ready to be rendered!

Furthermore, many emails are direct links to status pages of orders, account verifications, password resets, and so on, which are definitely most functional as a clickable URL.

[asielen]

Any formatting in email is html.

There is nothing that requires any text to have any formatting. But basic formatting can help readability. There is a reason to include bold or italics. Or headings. Or maybe even a simple diagram/image, or make links more approachable than the raw url.

Snail mail letters can include all of the above (except links), why not email?

Even when written memos were the norm in business, they still had company letter head.

[legitster]

To add to this, plaintext emails are a much bigger avenue for phishing, MITM attacks, and scammers.

Especially when dealing with technology, consistent branding actually has an important safety factor for consumers.

[oliwarner]

It's weird that your can't conceive of useful information that benefits from HTML elements (images, actual tables, links) and layout design to make it more readable. In pretty much the same way a web page does. I benefit from this as the reader. I want it.

That non-existent third option is critical for good communication.

[thrashh]

Some of us like beautiful things.

[NoraCodes]

Fair enough. I fully support hobbyists making email clients do fun tricks.

[thfuran]

>There is no third option

But only because the best way to accomplish the first option is to be cognizant of the way the information is presented so that it can be most effectively conveyed. And that can involve paying attention to layout and color and possibly including some graphics.