HTML Email
Spam complaints… ish
I know a lot of folks working at ESPs. For those I know well, I will usually send in reports. Sometimes they’re not spam reports per se. Often it’s just “hey, this sender shouldn’t have my address, might want to poke them.”
Sometimes it’s even more specific. A few years ago I spoke at a user conference for an ESP. I stayed at the hotel for one night, and the hotel now has my email address. Not a big deal, they’re on the coast and an easy drive from here. They’ll run specials for the locals, and I like it.
Enter in hotel B. I’ve never stayed at hotel B. I’m not sure who hotel B is. They’re also local and may be the same management. I don’t know. They sent me email to the address I’ve only given to hotel A. Not only that, the message is completely unreadable. Dark blue on brown… not exactly a great design choice.
I wasn’t going to send anything in to the ESP, but then I noticed that at the bottom of the email there is a notice that says “This email was sent to: %%emailaddr%%.” That looks suspiciously like this was an accidental send. The ESP folks there are colleagues, so I sent them an email into abuse@.
DOD breaks links in .mil clients
The Department of Defense is breaking HTML links in mail to .mil domains. This is part of the DoD’s attempt to curtail phishing.
Email design resources
One of the more frequent questions I get that I can’t answer is how to design a good email. Design is just not my strong point and outside actually getting the HTML right, what an email looks like doesn’t have a whole lot to do with delivery. It was pointed out to me today that the nice people over at Mailchimp have a resource page for designing emails. It’s a good mix of theory and explanation and some code examples.
Very useful if you’re trying to create pretty HTML emails from scratch.
Update on FixOutlook.org campaign
Last week I mentioned that the Email Standards Project has started a website (FixOutlook.org) and a twitter campaign to pressure Microsoft to use a HTML compliant rendering engine for Outlook. Currently Outlook uses the HTML engine in MS Word and that engine is not fully compliant with of the HTML standards as published by W3C.org.
Microsoft did reply to the FixOutlook.org campaign on the MSDN Developer blog. The money quote, which they bolded for emphasis in the original post: