I want my web app to send certain mails as HTML in order to include product images.
I could of course provide a text/plain alternative as well, but is it worth the effort in this day and age? Are there common mail clients that don't support text/html, do many people turn it off for some good reason (I suppose spam, bandwidth), are there other reasons such as decreasing the risk of being classified as spam?
I can theorize, but would be interested to hear if someone has statistics, experience or other insight to support or speak against going text/html only.
You are best to send both because:
It helps reduce your spam score, even more so if your text version has the same text and links as your HTML version. This is especially true on Outlook, where no text version almost guarantees it will go the Junk folder.
A lot of people do request a text version on the client-side. Some old Blackberries default to this setting, and Windows Mobile <= v5.
Provide both. HTML in email has a slew of security problems, so those that are security-minded tend to disable HTML email in favor of plain text. Also, reply quoting conventions are fairly well-establised for text/plain data and not for HTML, making meaningful discussions in pure-HTML mail threads ugly.
Since you do have control over the content of the message, please make the plain text version readable. Some MUAs tend to auto-create the text/plain part, and do a horrible job in doing so. So if your messages are intended for customers, make sure the text/plain part is formatted nicely so you do not alienate them.
I believe clients such as iOS mail use the text/plain version to preview the first couple of lines before the user opens the mail.
I think HTML only is OK, but it should be legible without images downloaded. Outlook and Gmail both block images by default to stop tracking and viruses.
You should always have a text/plain alternative. I don't have statistics, but I'm sure that a lot of people disable HTML emails. Including me, because I'm annoyed by all those product images and meaningless fancy newsletters.
Stats I found were that 90% of emails were viewed in html-capable email viewers. If you choose not to include an option for plain text, you could be losing out on 10% of your audience. On the other hand, a well designed html email could more than outperform the 10% loss, so it might be worth the trade off.
I am struggling to get both working on PHP with Hostgator, so I think I'm going to focus on the low hanging fruit (the 90% who view html emails) and not worry about the 10%. Like IE 7, there comes a point where you can no longer support all platforms.
Google does HTML email by default, this includes Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Educations. Thus millions of Gmail users send and receive HTML email rather than plain text email. Not sure whether there are any better stats than that out there.
Related
I have a habit of sending html emails to my friends. I usually rely on encryption provided by my protonmail account but occasionally I use less secure accounts as gmail and yahoo.
Would sending the body of the message in the form of an image increase my privacy and resistance to being surveiled? I'm mainly concerned with my email and phone number being scraped from the body of the message. When such a measure applied, would using different type of images, let's say jpeg instead of png, make a difference in their resistance to optical character recognition technology?
P.S. I write my emails in LaTeX, compile them to pdf files, and then I use the following code to create my images:
#!/usr/bin/bash
for f in *.pdf; do
pdftoppm -png -rx 1920 -ry 1080 ./"$f" ./"${f%.pdf}"
done
I think I'd class this as inappropriately paranoid.
Protonmail is great, no problem there. No matter what you do, when you send an email to a gmail account, they unavoidably know your email address, and from that they can index into their monstrous data reserves and link it up with not only your phone number, but pretty much everything about you, regardless of what you do within your email messages.
Technically speaking, for clean text on a plain background, PNG will look better, OCR better, and probably compress better than JPEG, but if you're out to hide stuff, overcompressed jpeg will make quite a mess and be harder to OCR, but also harder to read. However, considering that most text-based CAPTCHAs are now fairly easily defeated, nothing you do like this is likely to present any significant obstacle for the likes of google to read if they really want to.
The one thing you can of course do is to encrypt your messages with PGP or S/MIME. This will work fine in gmail; recipients won't be able to read messages in the web interface, but they will have no problem using an external encryption-capable email client (e.g. Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook). Gmail will still of course see all the metadata relating to such messages, so if you're really that concerned, take the OPSEC route and simply don't ever send email to gmail (or gmail-hosted) addresses, or never include your phone number in messages (though that's probably not much of a defence anyway).
I got a request from my client that they want to add stars (★) to their email subject (They send these mails through the application we made as a part of bigger CRM for them).
I tried to send a test mail, and the email title is displayed nicely in my Gmail account, and I must agree with my client that it is eye catching, but what came to my mind is that this may be a spam magnet, so I googled about it but I can't find the actual "don't do this".
Generaly, my oppinion would be not to use it, but now I have to explain to the client why. My best explanation whould be there is a probability your emails will be treated as spam but I don't have the background for this statement.
Do you have any suggestions about what should I do?
The only information I could find is on the SpamAssassin page of how to avoid false positives. The only relevant part I found was this part.
Do not use "cute" spellings, Don't S.P.A.C.E out your words, don't put
str#nge |etters 0r characters into your emails.
SpamAssassin is a very widely used spam filtering tool. However, simply breaking one of the rules (strange characters) alone wouldn't get an email marked as spam. But combined with some other problems could lead to your email being considered spam. That being said, if your email is a completely legitimate business email, it's likely that few other rules are triggered, and using the special characters wouldn't create a huge problem. That being said, you should probably try out a couple test emails on SpamAssassin and a couple other spam filtering tools in order to come to a better conclusion on the emails you plan to send out.
Simply explain to your client as you have explained to SO: you stated that the star made it eye catching: this doesn't directly mean that it will be treated as spam, but you could explain how that concept COULD be considered spam.
If the star is part of their branding, however, this could be quite a nice way in which your client expresses themselves.
Spam emails are becoming more and more like what one would consider 'normal', so I think they have trial it internally, test the concept.
Talk it over with your client - there is going to be no basis in hard fact with things like this, purely social perception.
More and more retailers are using unicode symbols in their subject lines since a few months. Of course it's in order to gain more attention in cluttered inboxes. Until now, there has been absolutely no evidence that such symbols increase the likelihood of failing spam filter tests. However, keep in mind that rare symbols might not render (correctly) across all mail user agents. Especially keep an eye on Android and Blackberry smartphones, but also on Outlook. In addition, due to a Hotmail bug symbols will render much bigger in subect lines and in the email body within the web front end. In fact, they are beeing replaced by images. All in all, the star shouldn't make any problems. At least, if it's encoded correctly in the subject line. So, go for it.
I am creating a new template design for 1shoppingcart, but although the email is formatted correctly for most emails, on Gmail the format is slightly off. There is a grey horizontal line at the top and bottom, and in the email there are white squares that don't fit inside the lines of the email.
I read that I have to use tabling for Gmail emails. Does anyone know what the issue might be and/or any people who I could pay to fix this?
Thank you,
Conrad
There are also a "soft cap" on the number of characters in a single line of HTML that can be submitted in email (it is around 700 characters). If a single line/element of markup exceeds that soft cap, it won't stop the email from being sent, but may cause some formatting breaks or other changes.
Remember that you don't need super flashy emails to make an impact, many people's mail clients (local, cloud, and webmail alike) are configured to reject graphics and other more advanced design techniques for security purposes. Keep your communications short and to the point and try to make it all fit as best as possible.
Also, with 1shoppingcart, you can set up a TEXT/HTML (MIME) email so in the event a customer could not read the email in HTML they could still view the text version.
Read this article design-guidelines about designing html emails. Maybe it will help you.
Quote from article:
Because clients like Gmail and Outlook
2007 have poor support for float,
margin and padding, you’ll need to use
tables as the framework of your email.
Aside from the visual splendor of HTML emails - links are the only thing keeping me from sending plain text emails. They are much simpler for users at times and reduce bandwidth by over 50%. However, forcing my users to copy/paste or (* shiver *) type the URL from the plain text email is not acceptable.
However, it seems like many services such as gmail and hotmail are converting URLs into HTML links. If that's true, then for some lighter emails I could finally switch to plain text (in certain cases) without bothering anyone.
Anyone know what percentage (or what systems or clients) convert text URLs into clickable links?
Some users access via the web (Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail) while others use clients (Outlook/Thunderbird).
All email progams I know make links clickable, web-based and normal ones.
You should consider putting the links at the end of the mail, and use "[number]" to refer to them:
You should really visit PEAR[1] and friends, PHP[2]!
[1] http://pear.php.net/
[2] http://www.php.net/
That frees you from problems with longer URLs within the text, and it keeps the text readable.
You must not forget one simple fact and that is every mail client make this configurable. So I for one have the option of reading / sending html emails but I don't do that. So it's totally irrelevant how many mail clients support this, the relevant question is how many users have this enabled.
Most services offered online today that claim to "track" e-mails, do so by embedding images in the emails. My questions are:
Is this the only way to do it and if not, what are the other methods?
Are any of the methods actually fool-proof?
Has anybody had any luck with specific software or even an online group?
Yes, this is pretty much the only way to do it. Consider that an email is something that is inherently static. The only way to know if someone has "opened" an email is for the email to send some information back to your server. Most email clients these days support HTML emails, which means that you can get the client to request an image (or anything else) from your server by embedding the proper HTML tags. Other than this, you cannot force an email client to do anything it doesn't want to do. It's a separate program on a remote computer, and you have no control over it.
No, there's no foolproof way. There will always be emails you can't track. If someone downloads their email and disconnects from the internet before reading it, you can't track that email. Most email clients allow you to disable image loading now as well if you want to, so that can block tracking too.
I've usually written my own, so I wouldn't know what to recommend. I imagine most services will be quite similar, so I'd base a product/purchase decision on how easy their front-end is to use.
In addition to pixel tracking, a second way to track open rates is by looking for clickthroughs. If someone clicked through, then they must have opened it. This is infrequent, but it's important not to throw this data away.
More details:
How MailChimp tracks open rates
How CampaignMonitor tracks open rates
Wikipedia on email open rates
Hubspot on open rate issues
Facebook uses a bgsound element in addition to an img element like this:
<img src="http://www.facebook.com/email_open_log_pic.php?mid=999999999999"
style="border:0;width:1px;height:1px;" />
<bgsound src="http://www.facebook.com/email_open_log_pic.php?mid=99999999999&s=a"
volume="-10000" />
This is the best way, and it's hardly ideal - many e-mail clients block images to start with.
No, no methods are foolproof. A foolproof method of detecting if someone had read an e-mail would be a significant privacy issue.
I've used ExactTarget and CampaignMonitor's tracking systems. Both worked pretty well for tracking trends - i.e. twice as many people opened e-mail #1 than #2 - but you never know how many missed opens there are due to images not being shown.
Pixel tracking is the only way to track open rates. Then the links in your emails are also tracked through a redirect service for click rates. Absolutely nothing is going to be foolproof. You will have to use some guess work to figure out your actual open rate since some email clients will only take the text version and not the html and also some clients do not load images by default.
SilverPop is a popular one. They actually use PowerMTA on the back-end. Our company just ended up licensing PowerMTA and writing our own front-end and tracking.
No it's not the only way. Your HTML e-mail can refer to a web server for 'some content' which is then tracked. That could be an image, a stylesheet, some Javascript, etc. Most mail clients hate it and nothing automated is guaranteed to work.
Gain the trust of your recipient and invite them to your website. Track clicks.