[dsabanin]

Well if people read them and click on the links from these emails, then you must be wrong. Surprise! Did you even read the post?

If you don't want them, it doesn't mean nobody does. There's also an unsubscribe link at the bottom.

[acuozzo]

Yes, I read the entire post from beginning to end. I still wholeheartedly believe that nobody wants e-mails like this. Yes, I'm speaking in absolutes and yes, I don't give a damn.

> If you don't want them, it doesn't mean nobody does.

Correct. I chose to speak in absolutes to make a point.

> There's also an unsubscribe link at the bottom.

That's wonderful, but I'm pretty sure the terminal emulator I'm running Alpine in doesn't do automatic URL lexing...

HTML is for the WWW. Please keep it out of e-mail. Thanks.

[nivla]

Curious, without HTML do you expect everyone to copy-paste confirmation and password reset links? How do you account for broken links due to message truncate or unicode rendering? What about aligning various sections of the message? Controlling the font size of header, body and footer?

HTML has as much history in emails as it does in the web. Taking HTML out of email is as hard as trying to take the Smart Phone out of phones today.

[acuozzo]

> Curious, without HTML do you expect everyone to copy-paste confirmation and password reset links?

Yes, I do.

> How do you account for broken links due to message truncate or unicode rendering?

I've never encountered a broken hyperlink due to message truncation or Unicode rendering. My terminal emulator is set to use the UTF-8 character-set. Please provide an example or demonstration of this.

> What about aligning various sections of the message?

Text comes left-aligned in most of the world and right-aligned elsewhere. What kind of alignment are you referring to here?

> Controlling the font size of header, body and footer?

What's the value in altering the appearance of the text you want to send to someone?

> HTML has as much history in emails as it does in the web.

Incorrect.

> Taking HTML out of email is as hard as trying to take the Smart Phone out of phones today.

I don't have a "smart" phone. What can I gain by owning one?

[nivla]

>Please provide an example or demonstration of this.

There are two limits that this standard places on the number of characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF. [1]

>What kind of alignment are you referring to here?

>Controlling the font size of header, body and footer?

I am talking about visual separations within the message. In pure text, everything carries the same weight, same font and same color. From the link of the site in the header to the unsubscribe at the bottom gets prominently displayed to you.

>Incorrect.

Well I couldn't find any reliable information to counter that. However as far I can remember, HTML emails have existed in the early days of Hotmail and Yahoo.

[1]http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html

[manicbovine]

It's trivially easy to setup an email client in such a way that links are accessible via keyboard or mouse.

[subsection1h]

    Curious, without HTML do you expect everyone to
    copy-paste confirmation and password reset links?

You've seriously never used an email client that makes plain text URIs clickable?

[nivla]

To be honest, I have never paid attention to it. However, I believe its not in the standard or RFC to automatically convert http:// and mailto:// text into clickable links. Therefore I wouldn't be surprised if there are email client that doesn't support it.

[dsabanin]

http://www.madboa.com/geek/pine-macosx/#mimeapps-web

[acuozzo]

Nice, thanks!

[ownagefool]

I worked for probably the largest hosting providor in the UK and directly worked on their email system which largely consisted of genric marketing emails.

They had a lot of data from these emails and it's hard to argue with the sheer size of the company, but data I'm pretty sure they didn't have is whether or not this type of behaviour turned off more customers than it turned on.

Like I said, it's hard to argue with the sheer size of the company but they were living off of momentum gained from companies which were bought, with churn rates forever growing in just about every brand.

While I'm not going to suggest this is all down to sending a few dodgy emails, it did feel like it had a lot to do with putting the marketing department before technical competency.

[3825]

I am surprised at how I randomly go to my spam email address once a few months and end up interacting with services that I thought I would never go back to

It is like they get a second chance for sending me emails and not giving up on me.