What the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos.
When they see a plain text email from a site they would be more likely to think they are being scammed than to be impressed at its simplicity and ability to display in the terminal.
When every website is hacking around broken table layouts to get them to render in outlook (essentially Word), something is wrong and should be fixed.
I posit that the average user doesn't want to put the time into reading plain text to find out if the email is worth their attention, images and colours are easier and quicker to process. A lot of information can be communicated quickly with some photos and a nicely formatted graphically rich message, probably with a large link button that takes the user to a relevant web page for further engagement.
This is not an endorsement of the practice, just an observation.
But do they really? Most those "nicely designed" emails, to be honest, are spam. Either outright spam, like v14g4 and p3n1s pills (modern mail systems deal with those well enough), or only slightly more respectable spam like "you bought in our store once, so now we will hound you forever with ads for our good and services that you don't need anymore".
Among this sea of garbage, there are rare islands of useful updates - like genuine newsletters I subscribed to, or email from my doctor about test results, or reminder from my bank that they are going to deduct that car payment, whether I like it or not, so there better be money there, etc. And of course Amazon shipping notifications! If all those need any HTML, then only the most rudimentary one.
Of course, if you asked a user whether they'd want to get ugly marketing spam or beautiful one, I guess they'd choose the beautiful one. But that's not the right thing to ask.
This is absolutely not my experience. Spam uses HTML formatting, sure, but it's not "nicely designed".
"Nicely designed" emails are things like flight confirmations, invoices, shipping notices, and that kind of transactional email. The common thread is that some entity with Real Money To Spend on a graphic designer is sending a (usually form) email to lots of people. Most spam outfits do not have those kinds of resources, especially since they need to change up their emails constantly to avoid spam filters.
The closest I would say that the "pretty" stuff gets to spam is newsletters and particularly political fundraising emails; I'm on a lot of political party lists after spending copious college free time working on campaigns.
The common thread about those non-spam transactional e-mails you mention is also that they're usually barely above plaintext. They usually contain some minimally styled table, and some of the company colors. Maybe their logo somewhere. That's in stark contrast from the spam these same companies send, which is where all that "Real Money To Spend on a graphic designer" goes. Compare e.g. the spam PayPal sends you vs. the e-mails confirming payments you've made. In my experience, this is pretty universal.
And speaking of universal heuristic, in my experience, the quality and relevance of content is strongly inversely correlated with the quality of design. The prettiest websites out there are ones that deliver negative value. The best designed (according to modern trends) user interfaces are the ones with worst ergonomy, wasting user time the most.
And yes, the subset of spam that's most recognized - ED pills, reproductive organ enlargement, members of royalty looking for help managing their finances - they tend to be very simply designed. But their distinguishing feature isn't simplicity of design. It's the carelessness. Typos, bad grammar, highly visible formatting mistakes, etc. When, on occasion, one of that "old school" spam messages tries to pose as a legit transactional e-mail, you can see through the deception by noticing the carelessness in replicating the design of the company being impersonated.
> And speaking of universal heuristic, in my experience, the quality and relevance of content is strongly inversely correlated with the quality of design. The prettiest websites out there are ones that deliver negative value. The best designed (according to modern trends) user interfaces are the ones with worst ergonomy, wasting user time the most.
This is just plain untrue, and seems to color your impression of email as well. See e.g. Delta vs Southwest (more polished look is more ergonomic site/app), or New Relic vs Datadog public-facing sites (indistinguishable in "quality" of the design, for competing products where IMO Datadog is better).
What are some examples that put the inverse correlation in your mind?
V1gr4 spam isn't nicely designed, but marketing we-arent-really-spam-because-we-have-unsubscribe-link spam - surely is. That includes political marketing too, of course, selling politicians is just another form of selling.
I run an email forwarding service[1] so I deal with spam a lot.
Spam usually has bad formating, mixed charset, old/broken layoyt etc.
Most of time, spam are odd designs. Example they only have HTML and didn't have the corresponding plain text part. They have large pictures and too little text, they have many "invisible" part so that hide behind element to trick you to click the wrong thing.
Even in plain-text, spam tend to include random links, very long text, weird chracter etc
A nicely design, or a plain-text emails(only plain text) with nice format all are good signal of non-spam.
In other word, consistency is signal of non-spam emails. But sometime marketing emails-which you never explicitly subscribe to, you just register for an account and got marketing emails, can also be consider spam, but from google/hotmail point of view they don't consider these are spam and that's reason they have Promotion tab to put thing in there
This may come down to whether you consider marketing email from legitimate businesses to be "spam" or if you reserve the term for the more scammy/seedy type of mail.
I unsubscribe from marketing mails, those are legally required to have an unsubscribe link in them. You should try clicking on that if you don't like marketing mail. If they don't stop you can threaten legal action in both EU and US without issue.
If it doesn't have this link, it's spam. If it's trying to get me to buy something I didn't explicitly wishlist on a store, it's spam. If it's unsolicited marketing, it's spam.
And even if I were to include all marketing email, including those I am interested in, then plaintext mail would still constitute the majority of spam mails I receive.
I personally found out that it's easier and faster to train my spam filter to move these mails into the spam folder. (I'm using claws-mail with bogofilter, which works quite well.)
Whenever I have to interact with a company, I check the spam folder for their replies.
The majority of mails in my spam folder is html mail.
It's safer as well. Some (most?) of those "unsubscribe" links have a unique ID hooked in with your email in some database so they know that they have a hit and can send more email to you.
Well, they need something to be able to tell which email to remove from their DB too.
Not all is as sinister as it looks.
The simply solution is to just can any senders that don't respond to unsubscribe requests. But those will be just as bad in plaintext as in HTML, so I don't see why Plaintext means it's not spam, they can do the same thing Plaintext.
The majority of mails in my spam folder is plaintext mail. Second place are the extremely malformed HTML mails. Almost any wellformed HTML mail I receive is solicited at minimum.
I can recommend using the unsubscribe link if you forgot to uncheck the newsletter checkbox during registration. Alternatively send them a mail to A) remind them of the SPAM-CAN act or your local equivalent legislation and B) that they should delete your mail from the newsletter. That works almost always, if not you can always threaten legal action (where I live, that's an easy 600€ of profit in a courtroom).
That's... what I said. I mentioned the unsubscribe link for solicited marketing mails, where that is in fact relevant. Unsolicited email would be pretty damn illegal in my home country to begin with (and a GDPR violation).
It is illegal but very common. Many of those emails with unsubscribe links are unsolicited. They either spam all their former customers no matter if they have opted in or not or they just buy links. Yes, the unsubscribe links work but what they do is in obvious violation if the gdpr and other laws.
Very few companies would risk those lawsuits, especially in Europe the fines can get rather exponential for repeat violators and I don't think it's much different in the US either. If the unsubscribe works, that is the end of the story for me, and a reminder to check for small newsletter checkboxes when signing up to things.
I very rarely get marketing mails from any reputable company that are completely unsolicited. In most cases it's a followup from trying out an offering or updates to products I'm using or are adjacent to those. If I'm not interested, I either ignore them or unsubscribe if it's repeatedly not interesting.
This is a much more effective "spam" strategy compared to "all HTML is spam".
Spam sent to different domains (especially in different TLD) tends to be different so experience can be different.
In my observations badly formatted spam exists, but have big intersection with the spam which is relatively easy to filter out. Nicely formatted HTML spam on other hand is hard to filter because the only difference with legitimate marketing email is lack of any consent from the sender. Sure I can hit an unsubscribe link and my be never will get spam from the same domain again, but spammer will know that this email is active and will include the address in spam send on behalf of other customers.
Well, that is where the line of solicited and unsolicited mails fall, spammers are generally unsolicited (so no previous mail address confirmation), their unsubscribe links won't work and >90% of them are plaintext with the remainder having bad or illformed HTML. 99.8% of marketing mails I get have an unsubscribe link that works because it forgot to uncheck the newsletter when signing up, those are not an issue. And those are usually HTML mails with well formed formatting.
I just looked through my Junk folder and it took me about 30 seconds to find an email that was sent as plain text. Most of this time was spent digging through Mail's menus to figure out how to show the raw message.
> What the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos.
Do they? Do they really like it? Did anyone actually asked? And no, A/B testing your design's capability to trick the user into paying you money isn't measuring whether they like it or not.
I have an alternative proposal: average user just accepts what they're given, because they have no other choice. Nobody listens to their opinion (again, tracking and telemetry is not the same as listening to people). Abusive designs and patterns are adopted industry-wide very quickly, so there's rarely an opportunity for the user to vote with their wallet - after all, they can't choose something that's not available in the first place. On top of that, the average user lacks the mental models and language to conceptualize what is wrong and how much better technology could be if it was slightly less abusive. All they can do is accept that computers are annoying, and casually complain about this to friends and family.
There's a reason the most popular media is video and images and the main social media platforms are practically platforms for sharing video and images.
The average person all over all the world is almost functionally illiterate (literacy level of a middle schooler or maybe high schooler, at best). They really, really don't want text. They'll only read as much as they have to, and they will definitely choose images over text if they can.
I don't even think it's a matter of liking or disliking, but more a matter of being blind to the standard formatting (something that most deal with on their jobs).
At the end of the day if you see another blob of text, you either skim through it looking for what matters or you just delete/archive it.
They could even hate it, but it just stands out for better and worst.
> Do they? Do they really like it? Did anyone actually asked?
Oh yeah, they do like it and want it. That is why they use it. And yes, I talked with a guy who was literally like "I like the emails colorful and such, but we found through testing developers respond better to plain, so I send plain to them".
> What the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos.
Taste is generated. Cool trendy startups make "nicely designed" emails, users come to expect that. If scam emails looked "nicely designed" and Google sent emails in plaintext, the "nicely designed" emails would be considered untrustworthy. As a counterpoint, an "average user" wants software to work, and forcing every email client to parse HTML (which is far outside the scope of what an email client should do, especially with html as complex as it is today) often breaks things in unexpected ways.
In my opinion, html and plaintext are both inappropriate for email. HTML is far too complex, and plaintext is a bit too simple. I think a markdown-like syntax would be the best balance, but I'm pretty sure that ship has sailed.
From what I've seen from average user, they tend to struggle pasting text with the same font into their email reply, struggle to quote parts of the message or email hyperlinks in usable manner.
And thus is what people have come to expect, sadly, IMHO. Except for the technically inclined/HN userbase. Though another comment said Germans prefer plaintext emails w/o attachments.
Wouldn't say that is entirely true. Germans prefer HTML mail that amounts to simple rich text, ie bold and italic fonts, possibly some color highlighting if you're really daring. Pure plaintext isn't that well appreciated.
> Except for the technically inclined/HN userbase.
This community is as much an echo chamber as anywhere else. Just because an opinion is common here doesn't mean it's correct or reflects the wider population.
Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. - Hume, D
A commercial project aims for profit, not public service. The previous post explains why they are popular demands. And it is natural for commercial project to satisfy popular demands.
I've corresponded with others, also German, and they had the same preferences, even if not as explicitly stated as the examples in my other comment there.
We used to have our German newsletter available in plain text and styled. The vast majority of people chose the styled version. Not even 1 % picked text. No dark patterns involved, a simple radiobox. We do not offer the text version anymore.
I’m not the person you are responding to and I’m also a software dev (ie. not the average user), but I prefer a nice looking email that includes some simple graphics and formatting. So that’s at least one person that prefers that kind of thing to a plain text email and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. I think we can probably agree that there is a large subset of the population that likes “nice looking” websites, so why would emails be different.
> Now, with the emphasis on imagery across the web, users strongly preferred images that could be seen full screen or at a larger scale, looked high-quality, and showed detail clearly.
That article seems positively rife with weird assumptions, all to present email marketing in a favorable light. It's bad enough that I don't really trust the quote you gave from it.
> Because several of these constraints have been remedied over the years, many of the concerns that users had about subscribing have disappeared.
Read: Because we stopped asking permission and instead started spamming everybody who gave us their email address, people stopped thinking that not subscribing had any effect.
> The increase in sheer email volume over the years has created a scenario where people can’t possibly give all messages their full attention, so they care less about what they receive because they know they can easily ignore the noise or choose what they invest their time in.
Read: Our entire industry spams people so much that people know it's not worth reading.
> It’s no longer used strictly to describe unsolicited email messages. Participants in our study used the word “spam” to describe solicited marketing emails that they considered random, impersonal, irrelevant, with too much promotional hype, or coming in high volume.
Read: We required an email address for things that don't need one, then treated that as permission. How dare people consider our spam to be spam?
> Now that organizations are required to include an Unsubscribe link in their newsletters, this task has become easier.
If a company assumes that an email address given for identification can be used for marketing, or that it can be shared with third-parties/affiliates for marketing, then they are already pretty shady. I honestly have no way of knowing whether it's an actual Unsubscribe link, or whether it's a signal that the email address is actively read by a human and so should receive more spam.
> If users keep getting unwanted newsletters, the messages will start to backfire and become regular reminders that they’re annoyed with your company. Better to let them go.
This part I do agree with. Better still would be to not assume permission to send marketing to somebody just because there was a pre-checked both on a form.
Fully agree. When we launched our service, we used really simple plain text mails and we had users complaining that they looking unprofessional and spammy. We didn't go crazy with our email design, and we're certainly not pushing the limits of what's possible to use in an email, but just adding a bit of color, a log and some text formatting made a big difference. Haven't heard a complaint since.
I looked at the mail I really wanted to read from the most reputable entities (banks, government, business partners,...). Usually there is a logo at the top and the rest is mostly plain text with minimal formatting. A nice, colorful email, sometimes from the same companies usually mean one thing: ad.
This is no different from snail mail, where important communication is usually on standard white paper while ads are high quality prints on nice goossy paper.
And obviously, "average users" notice the pattern. Just like my father who almost trashed an important tax-related mail just because it looked too nice, he thought it was an ad.
So the "average user" prefer to see nice ads, I can get that. But what the average user really prefers no ads at all.
When they see a plain text email from a site they would be more likely to think they are being scammed than to be impressed at its simplicity and ability to display in the terminal.
When every website is hacking around broken table layouts to get them to render in outlook (essentially Word), something is wrong and should be fixed.