249 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. June 23, 2023

      Abstract

      We're not quite sure exactly when email was invented. Sometime around 1971. We do know exactly when spam was invented: May 3rd, 1978, when Gary Thuerk emailed 400 people an advertisement for DEC computers. It made a lot of people very angry... but it also sold a few computers, and so junk email was born.

      Fast forward half a century, and the relationship between email and commerce has never been more complicated. In one sense, the utopian ideal of free, decentralised, electronic communication has come true. Email is the ultimate cross-network, cross-platform communication protocol. In another sense, it's an arms race: mail providers and ISPs implement ever more stringent checks and policies to prevent junk mail, and if that means the occasional important message gets sent to junk by mistake, then hey, no big deal - until you're sending out event tickets and discover that every company who uses Mimecast has decided your mail relay is sending junk. Marketing teams want beautiful, colourful, responsive emails, but their customers' mail clients are still using a subset of HTML 3.2 that doesn't even support CSS rules. And let's not even get started on how you design an email when half your readers will be using "dark mode" so everything ends up on a black background.

      Email is too big to change, too broken to fix... and too important to ignore. So let's look at what we need to know to get it right. We'll learn about DNS, about MX and DKIM and SPF records. We'll learn about how MIME actually works (and what happens when it doesn't). We'll learn about tools like Papercut, Mailtrap, Mailjet, Foundation, and how to incorporate them into your development process. If you're lucky, you'll even learn about UTF-7, the most cursed encoding in the history of information systems. Modern email is hacks top of hacks on top of hacks... but, hey, it's also how you got your ticket to be here today, so why not come along and find out how it actually works?

  2. Dec 2023
    1. You can create variations of your email address where all messages arrive in your current inbox. Just add a plus sign (+) and any word before the @ sign in your current address.
  3. Sep 2023
    1. What are LIFO and FIFO?LIFO and FIFO are terms that come from the financial world—respectively, they stand for “last in, first out” and “first in, first out.” They’re often used by accountants to describe inventory but can refer to anything where items are coming “in,” like, well, emails. In this context, it refers to the practice of responding to either your oldest or your newest unreads first, then working your way in the opposite direction from there.Why is LIFO better than FIFO for email management?LIFO, or the practice of answering the most recent emails before older ones, is much more common than FIFO for good reason: Your more recent emails are timely and, depending on how old the past ones are, the ship on being late to them has already sailed. You should focus on the tasks at hand to stay on top of your work.
    1. To ensure your messages pass the DMARC check with flying colors, you'll need to make certain the domains listed in the From, Sender, and Mail-From headers match each other exactly. That is, the domain listed in the From header is the exact actual sending domain.
    2. For example, if your sending domain is ABCdomain.com, but your From field shows 123domain.com instead, you will almost certainly run into DMARC issues. Sometimes, even the difference between mail.ABCdomain.com and ABCdomain.com is sufficient for a server to place your message in a spam folder. We make sure that our Email Best Practices are clear that the domain listed in the From header and the actual sending domain should match for exactly this reason.
    1. For better deliverability it is recommended to use the same from domain as the sender,
    2. Domain names do not matter as much if you’re only sending. You can send messages from sales@mycompany.com even if your domain name is called anothercompany.org. Although, it is best for deliverability if you are using the same domain in the From field that the actual sender is using.
    1. Each message you send out has both the sender and from address. The sender domain is what the receiving email server sees when initiating the session. The from address is what your recipients will see. For better deliverability it is recommended to use the same from domain as the sender.
    1. Ultimately, the "On Behalf Of" notation highlights the mismatch between the domain used in the Sender field (mail.example.com) and the domain used in the From field (example.com).  In the above example, the envelope is sent through the domain mail.example.com, but the message is listed as being sent from the domain example.com.
    2. there is no way for Mailgun to prevent an email client from displaying the "On Behalf Of" notation as long as the domains contained in the Sender and From fields don't match.  However, ensuring the exact same domain is used in both fields will eliminate the "On Behalf Of" notation.
    1. Essentially, @mac.com is legacy users and was in place from the debut of osX to late 2000s. It required a annual paid subscription to have an email address, lol. Then the short-lived mobileMe era happened, which lasted only a couple years before Apple retracted and replaced it with iCloud, a much more sweeping service. MobileMe was also a paid subscription and included primordial versions of photo sharing and web hosting, etc. The iCloud era starting in 2012 finally ushered in free email addresses and free operating system updates. That's when the business model of large tech companies turned more into user accumulation wars to see who can attract the most subscribers and retain them in their ecosystem of products.
  4. Jul 2023
    1. To answer your question about register, register doesbelong to the domain of timbre but differs from instrumentation that also belongs to timbre. I understand that in organ music the word "register" is synonymous to characteristic timbres of musical instruments. But confusion like this is inevitable with any of the 11 aspects: "melody" can have its own "harmony" (e.g., solo flute sonatas by CPE Bach), rhythm can be "metric" (e.g., compositions written in the genre of "perpetum mobile", e.g., Paganini or Weber), articulation can be dynamic (e.g., accent), etc..

      The distinction between register and instrumentation is that register is bound to pitch and underlies instrumentation. Every instrument and vocal usually breaks into 3 registers that can be classified in 2 general types: intensity growing towards the top (vocals and brass) or 5towards the bottom (reed woodwinds and strings). This typology goes against and across the distinctions between different timbres of the instruments. However, the distinctions between registers can be greatly reduced. For instance, the bel canto training can completely conceal a breaking point between neighboring registers. Also, the timbral differences between different instruments (and vocals) greatly exceed the timbral differences between different registers of the same instrument (or voice type).Yet another important distinction is that register plays a formative role for tonal organization of modes of timbre-oriented music that are characterized by indefinite pitch (relative and variable pitch values), such as ekmelic and khasmatonal modes. In such modes, the degrees are defined in regards to their position within a vocal register(s). It is possible that the same principles are in play in the instrumental forms of music of the same ethnicities that keep cultivating such vocal music (e.g., music for Jaw Harp or musical bow). The aspect of instrumentation completely misses this formative melodic modal function. Combinations of timbral colors of different instruments do notform specific musical modes. Timbral coloration is known to be modally formative only in instrumental ensembles consisting of the sameinstrumental types -e.g., a set of gongs. But then, such cases fall within the domain of register rather than instrumentation.On the other hand, instrumental timbres often blend, forming new composite colors (for example, clarinet + oboe). There is nothing remotely similar in the domain of register -registers don't blend.It can be generalized that register fundamentally opposes instrumentation: register is based on timbral similarity, whereas instrumentation -on timbral contrasts. Composers select a specific instrument to "color" constituent sounds in a musical composition in different colors. Singers (and possibly instrumental players) usually select a specific register to secure unityin timbral coloration for the pitch-classes of a musical mode. Timbral contrasts are important in khasmatonal music, where a mode is defined by the group of pitch classes of one register contrasting the other register (e.g., falsetto or rasping). However, such music is rather rare and is still operated by the principle of integratingtimbral colors into a melodic phrase rather than by differentiation of timbral color to color the music textures, as it occurs in instrumentation. The only exception is Schoenberg's experiments with Klangfarbenmelodie that did not work -and could not work, because changes of instrumental timbres within the same melodic stream has been demonstrated to segregate this stream into fragments that obstruct phrasing.

  5. Jun 2023
    1. Setup a recurring Zoom meeting for set times every week where you guarantee to be present. As much as possible, when people send you an ambiguous request or initiate a conversation that will require a lot of back and forth, point them toward your office hours schedule and tell them to stop by next time they can to discuss. It’s a simple idea, but it can reduce the number of attention-snagging back-and-forth electronic messages in your professional life by an order of magnitude.
    2. I currently inhabit four professional roles: writer, teacher, researcher, and director of graduate studies for my department. For each of these roles, I set up a Trello board that includes a column for: things I’m working on actively, thing I’m waiting to hear back about from someone else,  things on my “back burner” that I’m not yet ready to tackle, and  a list of ambiguous or complicated things that I need to spend some time on figuring out. Every email I receive immediately gets moved to one of these columns in one of my Trello boards.
    1. Saturday, 10 December 2022 at 2:47:34 AM South Africa Standard Time

      email from Nikolsky 20221210

    2. Riemann was first and foremost an empirical scientist who sought to adequatelydescribe the practice of music composition (being a composer himself) and ways of howlisteners perceive and make sense of these compositions. Neo-Riemannians, in contrast,try to forge a universal "nomothetic" music theory that would prescribe a set of "laws" thatsupposedly secure the creation of "good" musical compositions - this, in essence, is thefoundation of the Schenkerian approach. (Schenker seems to have come up with his ideasfrom his experience of correcting mistakes of his pupils in the conservatory that they madein their written harmonization exercises).

      Lewin used mathematics to abstract 2 models: the Generalized Interval System (GIS) andthe Transformational network. The former was supposed to define a set of musical objects,generalize intervals of pitch and time, and infer mathematical functions that mapped all Page 6 of 16possible pairing of musical objects. “Transformations” were supposed to model possibleactions upon the musical objects. Such modeling might be useful for automatic computer-based analysis of music and for the design of psychoacoustic experiments, but it hasnothing to do with the pragmasis of musical communication. This is not that different fromthe notorious theory of generative grammar by Chomsky, which Chomsky himself had topronounce wrong, but which nevertheless proved to be very useful for computerized studyof languages. The dichotomy between the nomothetic math-based prescriptive and empirical psychology-based descriptive approaches to music theory dates back to Classic Antiquity, to thefamous criticism of Pythagorianism by Aristoxenus (the Aristotle's pupil). A brilliant old-timeAmerican music theorist and ethnomusicologist, Norman Cazden, succinctly summarizedtheir arguments in his essay: Cazden, Norman. 1958. “Pythagoras and Aristoxenos Reconciled.” Journal of theAmerican Musicological Society 11 (2/3): 97–105.https://doi.org/10/gmnfj5.Riemann's main idea was that chords that emerge from the counterpoint of multiple partsend up forming a finite number of harmonic "classes". These classes are consistentlyreproduced in different keys and in different compositions by different composers in avariety of implementations (e.g., inversions) and can be identified by their harmonicfunctions - i.e., relative fluctuations in harmonic tension and relaxation, which determinedthe positioning of these classes within a musical form. Unlike the Neo-Riemannian"transformations", these functions reflected the conventions of musical communicationbetween composers, performers, and listeners - the common practice of engaging specificharmonies to initiate, terminate, and culminate musical phrases and sentences. Importantly, Riemann made a few critical errors in defining the functional characteristics ofminor keys and what he called iambic meters. However, these shortcomings werecorrected by his followers - especially in Russia, where the "Golden Age" of classical musicpromoted the boom of music theory, and the widespread of modal folk music, very differentfrom Western music, directed music theorists towards greater attention and deeperunderstanding of principles of tonal organization that guide creators of very diverse musiccultures. As a result, Riemann's theory of functional harmony merged with the theory ofmusical mode. In contrast, in the West, modal theory was largely abandoned after the 17th century. Thedifference between musical mode and musical scale (a principal structural unit of theSchenkerian and Neo-Riemannian theorists) is that mode incorporates not only a set ofpitch classes but also the functional relations between them as revealed in typicalprogressions of harmonies within a given musical composition. From this point of view, notall compositions nominally created in the same key share the same functionalcharacteristics. A C-Major prelude from volume I of the Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach, C-Major "Simple" sonata by Mozart, “Locus iste” by Bruckner, Bolero by Ravel, "DoctorGradus at Parnassum" by Debussy, Valse des fleurs by Stravinsky, and "Juliet - the girl",No.10 from Prokofiev's ballet "Romeo and Juliet" - all these compositions noticeably differ Page 7 of 16No.10 from Prokofiev's ballet "Romeo and Juliet" - all these compositions noticeably differin the use of harmonic progressions and therefore present different modal implementationsof the same key of C Major. Neo-Riemannian analysis fails to capture their differences(that are quite obvious from mere comparative listening to these pieces), while RussianRiemannian-based analysis easily spells out their specificities.

    1. I think that Riemannian theory applies to anymusic culture where multi-part textures occupy an important role, and music-users observe harmonic intervalsor/and chords. Technically speaking, even West African indigenous cultures that utilize parallel motion of chords (as identified and described by Kubik in his many books on African harmony) possess at least some basic harmonic functions. Although their harmony is generated by the 3-part dubbing of a melody in parallel thirds, the interaction of such dubbings with the metric grid inevitably puts in place some hierarchical distinctions between chords that are built on different degrees of melodic modes. Chords on those degrees that systemically fall on weaker metric time are likely to become subordinated to those chords that fall on stronger metric time. This is exactly the foundation of Riemannian theory.

      If you are interested, here is a thorough critical overview of Riemannian approach:Rehding, Alexander. 2003. Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought. Cambridge University Press.Below are a couple of reviews of the applicability of Riemannian principles to jazz:McGowan, James. 2010. “Riemann’s Functional Framework for Extended Jazz Harmony.” Intégral 24: 115–33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41495296.Capuzzo, Guy Capuzzo. 2004. “Neo-Riemannian Theory and the Analysis of Pop-Rock Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 26 (2): 177–200. https://doi.org/10.1525/mts.2004.26.2.177.All Soviet and Russian musicology is based on Riemann

  6. May 2023
  7. Apr 2023
    1. overview of protocol used for sending mail during the 80s, 90s, and early aughts

  8. Mar 2023
    1. Narzędzia administracyjne Google Nagłówek wiadomości

      Narzędzia administracyjne Google Nagłówek wiadomości

    1. And if effective moderation turns out to requiremore infrastructure, that could lead to a greater consolidation of instances.This is what happened with email, which, in part due to the investmentsnecessary to counter spam, has become increasingly dominated by Googleand Microsoft.

      Will consolidation of email providers point to consolidation of fediverse instances?

      This is useful to note. The email protocols are open and one can chose to host their own email server that—at a protocol level—can interoperate with any other. At a practical level, though, there is now service requirements (spam filtering) and policy choices (only accepting mail from known good sending servers) that limit the reach of a new, bespoke mail server.

      What would the equivalent of an email spam problem look like on the fediverse?

  9. Feb 2023
    1. Forwarding will always break emails specially in Outlook as it adds it's own code before composing. You can have a forward link on emails which takes you to a page to forward to a friend or you can go with a broken email when it's forwarded. It's harsh I know but there is no way around it.
  10. Jan 2023
    1. https://www.gwern.net/Backstop#internet-community-design

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Henrik Karlsson   </span> in Conversational Canyons - Escaping Flatland (<time class='dt-published'>01/06/2023 10:40:49</time>)</cite></small>

  11. Dec 2022
    1. With Mailgun, you'll need to upgrade to a dedicated IP or "managed email service" and pay extra for "better deliverability." At Postmark, great deliverability isn't an up-charge. It's simply included, and we share live delivery data so you can judge for yourself.
    1. Many mail systems allow recipients to report mail as spam or junk, and mail streams from senders whose mail is often reported as junk tend to have poor deliverability. Hence, the mailers want to make it as easy as possible for recipients to unsubscribe; if an unsubscription process is too difficult, the recipient's alternative is to report mail from the sender as junk until the mail no longer appears in the recipient's inbox.
    1. Let’s say the recipient is considering unsubscribing. He or she may be too busy to search through the email to find the unsubscribe link, so he or she just clicks “Report as SPAM” to stop the emails from coming. This is the last thing any marketer wants to see happen. It negatively impacts sender reputation, requiring extra work to improve email deliverability. With the list-unsubscribe header, you will avoid getting into this kind of trouble in the first place.
  12. Nov 2022
    1. You can do searches that exclude certain labels. That is, searches like this will do what you expect: (label:MyLabel1 AND NOT label:inbox AND NOT label:MyBadLabel1) That search will show you only messages that: Do have MyLabel1 And do not have label inbox And do not have label MyBadLabel1 The tricks are: to get yourself out of conversation mode! (As @Ruben says above.) to use UPPER CASE for the logic operators (AND NOT will work, and not won't) If you leave "conversation mode" on, you will get confusing results. For example, doing that search above (with conversation mode on), will likely return messages that do NOT match your search. It may be a bit weird. Here's the deal: Conversations are collections of messages that all have the same Subject. When "conversation mode" is on, searches return entire conversations as results. So what should gmail search do if a conversation contains both a message that matches, and a message that does not match your search? You are probably expecting it to return conversations only if all messages in that conversation match. But that is not correct. Instead, Gmail search will return conversations even if only a single message in that conversation matches. So that means that if you do the same search above with "conversation mode" on, the results are likely to include messages that do not match your search!

      I came here looking for a way to exclude certain emails from searches in Gmail. I was trying to make sure some emails that were archived don't show up, and this approach works (but the Boolean operators must be capitalized):

      (label:label_I_want AND NOT label:label_I_dont)

      If the unwanted label msgs are a part of a conversation thread containing the wanted msgs, then I'll need to turn this off first:

      Go to the main Settings page, look for the “Conversation View” section, select the option to turn it off, and save changes. If you change your mind, you can always go back. source

    1. In this article, I am going to explain my adapted version of the notecard system.

      Note that he explicitly calls out that his is an adapted version of a preexisting thing--namely a system that was taught to Ryan Holiday who was taught by Robert Greene.

      Presumably there is both some economic and street cred value for the author/influencer in claiming his precedents.

      It's worth noting that he mentions other famous users, though only the smallest fraction of them with emphasis up front on his teachers whose audience he shares financially.

  13. Aug 2022
    1. it may take a few days to respond

      This appears to be an understatement.

      I emailed them on 2022-07-03 with a follow-up on 2022-08-05. Nothing heard as of 2022-08-08.

      EDIT: Nothing heard as of 2022-08-30.

  14. Jul 2022
    1. Rich link Add rich links that give your email messages more context and details at a glance.

      Oh waaaaw. How revolutionary.

  15. Jun 2022
  16. May 2022
    1. And it’s easy to leave. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, Substack writers can simply take their email lists and direct connections to their readers with them.

      Owning your audience is key here.

    1. Many companies send our passwords via email. Whether these emails come from our IT department, a colleague, a SaaS solution or elsewhere, it's not a good idea to send and receive passwords via email.

      Send passwords via email? A bad idea!

      Many companies send our passwords via email. Whether these emails come from our IT department, a colleague, a SaaS solution or elsewhere, it's not a good idea to send and receive passwords via email.

  17. Apr 2022
    1. IMAP URL for text fragment

      ``` The URL: <imap://minbari.example.org/gray-council;UIDVALIDITY=385759045/; UID=20/;PARTIAL=0.1024>

      may result in the following client commands and server responses:

      <connect to minbari.example.org, port 143> S: * OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 STARTTLS AUTH=ANONYMOUS] Welcome C: A001 AUTHENTICATE ANONYMOUS S: + C: c2hlcmlkYW5AYmFieWxvbjUuZXhhbXBsZS5vcmc= S: A001 OK Welcome sheridan@babylon5.example.org C: A002 SELECT gray-council <client verifies the UIDVALIDITY matches> C: A003 UID FETCH 20 BODY.PEEK[]<0.1024> ```

      ABNF: abnf partial-range = number ["." nz-number] ; partial FETCH. The first number is ; the offset of the first byte, ; the second number is the length of ; the fragment.

  18. www.hey.com www.hey.com
    1. It feels great to get an email from someone you care about. Or a newsletter you enjoy. Or an update from a service you like. That’s how email used to feel all the time.
    2. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.
  19. Mar 2022
    1. If we decide to part ways, Leads can leave with a copy of their email list.

      While a writer may leave a collective with their email list, do they necessarily benefit from having helped to get a going concern off the ground in the first place? Where does that slice of value sit? Do they also collect a multiple of the present value of the concern the way one might in buying a pre-existing business from another?

  20. Feb 2022
    1. Hence an email address/mailbox/addr-spec is "local-part@domain"; "local-part" is composed of one or more of 'word' and periods; "word" can be an "atom" which can include anything except "specials", control characters or blank/space; and specials (the *only* printable ASCII characters [other than space, if you call space "printable"] *excluded* from being a valid "local-part") are: ()<>@,;:\".[] Therefore by the official standard for email on the internet, the plus sign is as much a legal character in the local-part of an email address as "a" or "_" or "-" or most any other symbol you see on the main part of a standard keyboard.
    2. There's a common design flaw on many many websites that require an email address to register; most recently I came across this bug on CNet's download.com site: for some reason they don't accept me when I try to register an email address containing a "+", and they then send me back saying my address is invalid. It isn't!
    3. "+" is a completely valid character in an email address; as defined by the internet messaging standard published in 1982(!) RFC 822 (page 8 & 9)... Any website claiming anything else is wrong by definition, plus they are prohibiting me and many fellow anti-spam activists from tracking where inbound spam comes from:
    1. Sending secure email is one of the questions we hear more and more. This is a result of an increasing number of email security risks, hacks and other threats. So you're not the only person wondering, "How to send secure email in Gmail? (or any other public email service for that matter?") You'll find the answer in this article. This article concludes with a link to a free encrypted email service First check whether you meet the conditions.

      How to send secure email (in Outlook)? Sending secure email is one of the questions we hear more and more. This is a result of an increasing number of email security risks, hacks and other threats. So you're not the only person wondering, "How to send secure email in Gmail? (or any other public email service for that matter?") You'll find the answer in this article. This article concludes with a link to a free encrypted email service First check whether you meet the conditions.

  21. Dec 2021
    1. The Fastmail help documentation doesn’t provide a comprehensive list of header values. Maybe you can submit a ticket and ask Fastmail support for a list? Here are the ones I’ve found by trolling through message headers:AccountsAlertsCommercialCommunityPurchasesSpamA sample rule could look like:If *any* of the following conditions apply *A header called* x-me-vscategory *contains* commercial *Move to* (or *Apply label* or whatever) …

      This is a great way to potentially setup some rules for pre-filtering email based on category.

    1. Writers use References to indicate that a message has a parent. The last identifier in References identifies the parent. The first identifier in References identifies the first article in the same thread. There may be more identifiers in References, with grandparents preceding parents, etc. (The basic idea is that a writer should copy References from the parent and append the parent's Message-ID. However, if there are more than about ten identifiers listed, the writer should eliminate the second one.)
  22. Nov 2021
    1. Too often we feel like we need to reply to every email.

      Stop replying with things like, "Thanks for this".

    2. Work your way from top to bottom, one email at a time. Open each email and dispose of it immediately. Your choices: delete, archive (for later reference), reply quickly (and archive or delete the message), put on your to-do list (and archive or delete), do the task immediately (if it requires 2 minutes or less — then archive or delete), forward (and archive or delete). Notice that for each option, the email is ultimately archived or deleted.

      The ultimate purpose of any email message is to be archived or deleted.

    3. Have an external to-do system.

      Email is a chaotic task list organised by other people. When you think of it like that, it makes sense to get those tasks out of your email inbox and into another system that you control.

    1. Axios treats email as the primary product

      It's interesting to think that we've gone through maybe a decade of startups (e.g. Slack) telling us that we need to get away from the chaos of email, and now we're being pitched the idea that email is a quiet, more intimate space.

    2. “scannable emails”

      Scannable subject lines in emails: "your subject line should tell readers something specific and valuable. Summarize 2–3 of the biggest items in your update and separate them with a comma or em dash so ideas stand out at a glance."

  23. Oct 2021
    1. Too bad there wasn't more information in the citations, even just the author & title, let alone a short summary. I wouldn't follow the link.

  24. Aug 2021
  25. Jul 2021
    1. The contemporary email newsletter is not a novel form; often it amounts to a new delivery system for the same sorts of content — essays, explainers, Q&As, news roundups, advice, and lists — that have long been staples of online media. (Subscribe to enough newsletters and sort them the right way, and it’s possible to re-create something like an RSS-feed reader.)

      Email delivery apparently isn't much different than RSS. What sorts of functionality do RSS readers provide over email in terms of search, filtering, and presentation? Surely RSS is more powerful at slicing and dicing one's reader data.

      How do all these different forms of content fit into the greater set of genres in Western culture?

    2. These are emails composed for an audience not of one friend but of many fans. These emails are newsletters.

      Indication of the morphing of long emails into newsletters.

      How does blogging fit into this space and continuum? Blogging as the expansion of ideas to test them out, garner feedback and evolve ideas over time?

  26. Jun 2021
  27. May 2021
    1. [gripe]Email is supposed to be a text-only medium. I can concede a need for rich text - the occasional bold or italic - but background pictures are just needless bloat.[/gripe]
    2. Negative margins are in many cases equivalent to position:relative; with negative position, e.g. position:relative; top:-100px, as in Guffa's answer.
    3. I used to pull stunts like this all the time as soon as tables came. Really ugly, and may seriously embarrass any validator you run it trough: overlapping table cells. Works in most browsers though and even without css.
    1. You may have noticed your emails looking a little cramped in Hotmail and Outlook.com recently. The culprit? Discontinuation of support for the margin property in these email clients. Rather than honoring your carefully spaced paragraphs and images, Hotmail and Outlook.com are now completely stripping margin from paragraph tags, leaving default values (0 for the top, right and left; 1.35em for the bottom, to be exact) in their place.
    1. Negative values are mostly unsupported in html email. So is CSS position. For webmail at least, this is so that your email doesn't render outside of the desired window. Imagine Gmail with your CSS or email affecting the interface - they've limited the CSS you can use specifically to prevent this.
    2. Yeah, as many developers will tell you, designing/coding for email is an incredibly hit-or-miss proposition...this is simply one more thing that may work in some email clients. The only consistent behavior in HTML/CSS emails is that nothing is consistent. :-)
    1. No, most css doesn't work in emails, stick to tables and images.
    2. If you're trying to use flexbox as a responsive way to adapt your mails in different devices, well there's a framework for that called MJML hope it works for you.
    3. HTML in emails is somehow in a forgotten world and is about lots of years behind us.
    4. There is a lot of variation in styling support among different mail clients
    5. For now though, you're stuck with <table> and CSS2 support for your layouts.
    6. Honestly, even without flexbox support, most of the layout problems would be solved with simple-basic CSS3 support that is standard in all clients.

      layout problems don't need ; all we need is simple-basic CSS3 support that is standard in all clients.

    1. With every other change I make, I have to test in a dozen clients and make sure it looks fine. Why is there so much variation in email style implementation amongst different clients?
    2. I'm coding an email for a project and man! it's such a pain. Every other client has it's own implementation and supported rules. Some don't allow even simple properties like background-image while some support most advanced rules like media queries
    3. Why are there so many programming languages and frameworks? Everyone has their own opinion on how something should be done. Some of these systems, like AOL, Yahoo, etc... have been around for a decade, and probably not updated much.
    4. Simple fact is that HTML support is different in them because mail clients are so old, or others are allowed to operate in browsers where not all CSS or even HTML can be applied in a secure manner. Older clients have outdated browsers that you'll likely NEVER see brought up to standards; what with Opera's standalone aging like milk, and thunderbird lagging behind the firefox on which it's even built. Don't even get me STARTED on older clients like Eudora or Outlook.
    5. But more so, external style cannot be applied to a subsection of a web page unless they force it into an iframe, which has all sorts of issues of it's own which is why external CSS is usually ignored. Inline CSS is often stripped by the tag strippers who don't want you turning things on or off... and media queries shouldn't even play into it since the layout should be controlled by the page it's being shown inside (for webmail) or the client itself, NOT your mail.
    6. Whilst I realize the artsy fartsy types get a raging chodo over their goofy PSD based layout asshattery
    7. That's what's supported, and is all that is EVER likely to be supported... and even then be DAMNED sure you send multipart with a plaintext copy or a great many mail servers will flat out reject it on the assumption that no legitimate e-mail has any damned business even having HTML in it in the first place!
    8. that garbage has ZERO damned business in an e-mail which is why a great many places use HTML only e-mail as a trigger for spam detection! (if you send multipart as both text/html and text/plain, you're fine)
    9. That's something that has been bugging me too. I mean, it's fine if not everything is supported, but if everyone could agree on what is or should be supported then that would make a huge difference. But until then, it's going to be a struggle.
    10. I've worked with people at companies where this was their only responsibility. Setting up emails for clients, making sure they pass a battery of tests and look great in all browsers and clients. It's an incredible PITA and it's not a set it and forget it thing. Clients can change month to month; spam filters change, etc...
    1. Also cross-compatibility with mail clients can be hairy, so you should see what the industry experts are doing.
    2. I hate to be the guy who will destroy your day but... Tables. You need to work with nested tables/cells. If you think Gmail is annoying you will cry in agony if you also need Outlook support.Work with the good old HTML from the early 2000's. That's the only way to be sure everything will work as intended.Anything else will mostly result in a horrible mess, broken design and incompatible layouts.
    1. More importantly, using a plain email would save lots of time and effort. As a goal-driven-lazy person, that’s a good enough reason to start experimenting.
    2. They don't look like advertisements. The second the recipient interprets your email as an ad, promotion, or sales pitch—and it does take just a second—its chances of being read or acted upon plummet towards zero. A plain email leads people to start reading it before jumping to conclusions.

      forces you to read before deciding

    3. They feel more personal. It's no handwritten note, but it's much more personal than an over-designed email with the recipient's first name crammed somewhere inside.
    4. The plain, unstyled emails resulted in more opens, clicks, replies, and conversions, every time.
    5. They're less likely to go into the "Promotions" tab in Gmail (used by ~16% of all email users), for the same reasons above. From my testing, the plain emails typically end up in the Updates tab and some times even in the primary tab. Of course, the text in the email also affects this.
    6. The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more recipients and had 3.3x more clicks than the designed email.
    7. If you ever had to go through the hair-pulling process of designing emails, then you understand. If you haven’t, here’s why it’s such pain:
    8. Email tools/clients are inconsistent in how they render HTML and CSS. A designed email might look great in Gmail, broken in Outlook, and unreadable in Apple Mail. Half of all emails are opened on mobile devices (according to one study). Email looks good in different clients? Great, now make it work on a 4" screen just as well as on a desktop.
    9. Email require their own flavor of HTML and CSS. Want to have rows or columns in your layout? You'll have to use <table> tags—a method long buried by web developers. There's also no support for external stylesheets, element position styling, and so on...
    1. Apple Mail remains the most popular email service. Roughly 40% of people use it to read their emails. That’s followed by Gmail at around 20%.
    2. Embedded CSS: This style is becoming more popular with the rise of mobile and responsive emails. Embedded CSS codes are determined in one place of an email, generally in the <head> section as a <style>. Some email servers still strip the information out of this section, which can cause display problems.
    1. Although a lot of email development is stuck in the past, that doesn’t mean we can’t modernize our campaigns right along with our websites. Many of these tips can be baked right into your email boilerplate or code snippets, allowing you to create more accessible HTML emails without too much thought.
    2. I hate making newsletters, but absolutely love reading them.
    3. I hate making newsletters, but absolutely love reading them. Because of this, and on a semi-related note (apologies if this is off-topic/not allowed), I am in the process of creating a newsletter directory, allowing users to browse and find newsletters to sign up for.
    1. While it’s not quite completely table-free, I’ve managed to get The Intermittent Newsletter down to a single table—one that’s not even visible to non-Microsoft email clients. Along the way, I made an effort to make The Intermittent Newsletter accessible to more readers.
  28. Apr 2021
    1. Don’t replace words with emojis One thing you definitely don’t want to do is have your emojis get in the way of people being able to comprehend your subject lines. Emojis should be a complement to the words in your subject lines – they should never replace words themselves. It’s when people leave out words, right?
    1. Email Accessibility

      • Subject lines: Simple, No-nonsense
      • Preheaders (i.e., the snippet that shows up in the inbox view) need to clearly state the purpose of the email
      • Use alt text for images (even for logos, "unimportant" information. Blind and low-vision folks don't want to "miss out" on information. If you've decided it's important enough to include in your email, it's important enough for alt text)
        • Buttons should be large, bold color, obvious, and should have ARIA labels
      • Software like Salesforce, Constant Contact, and Mailchimp allow you to paste HTML code, which allows you to add ARIA roles, alt text, etc
  29. Mar 2021
    1. Ownership is the critical point here. Ownership in email in the same way we own a paperback: We recognize that we (largely) control the email subscriber lists, they are portable, they are not governed by unknowable algorithmic timelines.3 And this isn’t ownership yoked to a company or piece of software operating on quarterly horizon, or even multi-year horizon, but rather to a half-century horizon. Email is a (the only?) networked publishing technology with both widespread, near universal adoption,4 and history. It is, as they say, proven.

      This is very IndieWeb in flavor.

      It reminds me of Stanley Meyer who would read newspapers and magazines every day and cut out articles which he put into envelopes for his friends and children and mailed out every couple of weeks. Essentially his own newsletter, but by snail mail.

    1. A fun little site from fluffy with a great domain name.

    1. Another innovation that I’ve seen have been successful experiments in moving past the paradigm of associating e-mail addresses with individuals. When an address is instead assigned to a specific client, or to a specific type of request, and monitored by multiple different employees, it can go a long way to relieving the deeply-ingrained anxiety that we are ignoring those who need us.

      Shared emails amongst individuals can help mitigate the psychological pressure of things building up and being left undone.

    2. Thrive Away. If a Thrive employee sends an e-mail to a colleague who is on vacation, the sender receives a note that the colleague is away and the message is automatically deleted. In theory, a simple vacation auto-responder should be sufficient—as it tells people sending a message not to expect a reply until the recipient returns—but logic is subservient in this situation. No matter what the expectations, the awareness that there are messages waiting somewhere triggers anxiety, ruining the potential relaxation of a person’s time off. The only cure is to prevent the messages from arriving altogether.

      A fascinating potential solution to the email problem. This is focused on the company space, but how might one decentralize this for use in all email scenarios?

    3. This excerpt is drawn from “A World Without Email,” by Cal Newport, out in March from Portfolio.

      An overview of many email related research studies which indicates its design stresses us out unnecessarily.

    1. Can I CC or BCC world@hey.com? No. World@hey.com needs to be the first and only address in the "to" field.

      This ideas is almost hilarious!

    2. Why can’t you just email the web?

      An interesting framing for having your own website.

    1. Everyone knows friction in software is harmful. But I think we all continually underestimate just how big an influence friction is on what people actually do and use. People don’t write long multi-tweet threads because it’s a good way to post a short essay, they do it because it’s so low friction.

      Friction within software can be a very good thing.

  30. Feb 2021
    1. There are so many features like personalization, unsubscribe links and social networking widgets that will make sure your emails are more likely to fall into your prospects' inbox.
    2. Preheat your sending accounts and IP to improve your inboxt rate be over 90%
  31. Jan 2021