

The email boilerplate for sending out nicely formatted messages - tilt
https://github.com/seanpowell/Email-Boilerplate

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bjourne
I love this! At a few previous workplaces I could have put this project to
good use in our mail delivery system. But it is still a testament to the huge
difference between doing something and doing something right.

Uninformed people just don't get how hard it actually is to send mail.
Especially if you have a large distribution list and it is important that your
mail does not get caught in over-zealous spam filters. Those people you can
point to this project to prove that it takes time and effort to do something
as seemingly simple as mailing right.

It is the same with i18n. You can't just i18n:ize a site by storing the text
translations in the database and showing the right translation based on the
browsers Accept-Language header. It becomes a hugely more complex issue when
you consider stuff like search engines, date formatting, currency formatting,
whether sunday is the start of the week or not and so on.

~~~
hammock
What are some tips to keep your emails from getting caught in over-zealous
spam filters?

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Paul_S
If you send a plaintext email that is more than just a link to a dodgy domain
you are guaranteed to get through (unless you're already on a blacklist). This
is the only kind of spam I still get. Even spammers know to use plaintext
(well, some)!

~~~
bjourne
Well, yes, mostly. But you also want your email to be read, not only
delivered. Your email mail also contain some kind of CTA (call-to-action,
website to visit and so on...) which you are trying to get the reader to
respond to. Those numbers may be higher with well designed "beautiful" html
mails than plain text ones.

Lastly, you may want to measure how many people actually opens and reads your
mail and when they do it, instead of just letting it languish in your inbox.
It's trivial to do by embedding tracking pixels in the html mail, but
impossible in plain text ones. Personally, I abhor html mails like the plague,
and the people who believe that bold facing or underlining some text somehow
makes it easier to decipher some meaning from the text, but they do have a
purpose. Mostly for marketing purposes I admit.

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Jgrubb
Thank god. Crafting HTML email is a thankless job IMO, and Googling for
tips/help/pointers/bugfixes always makes me feel like Wall-E trying to sort
through mountains of marketing spam for some actual technical help.

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eli
Note that the website has a nice explanation:
<http://htmlemailboilerplate.com/>

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tehabe
The only advice on HTML in e-mail should be: don't!

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eli
I think you lost that battle like 15 years ago

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Paul_S
Nah, if someone sends me HTML it gets parsed into plaintext and if it doesn't
work I don't care what's in it. You want to send me a pretty document - feel
free to send me an attachment or a link. HTML emails are always ridden with
superfluous disclaimers and signatures not using the -- convention, they're a
waste of time.

~~~
eli
I got absolutely no problem with that, I just don't think you're going to win
many converts.

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michaelmior
Anyone interested in this may also wish to check out MailChimp's templates
<http://mailchimp.com/resources/html-email-templates/>

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Daviey
ugh.. HTML mail.. If this makes it easier for people to write good looking (or
bad) HTML mail, then it's a broken objective. Plain text mail please!

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fleaflicker
Does anybody have screenshots of what this looks like in the popular email
clients?

Also, this was previously discussed here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2628945>

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laurencei
wow - I've looking for this exact thing - so hard doing email templates for my
various apps - thanks

~~~
eli
Mailchimp has some decent ones for free <http://mailchimp.com/resources/html-
email-templates/> (it should be easy to adapt them for other email providers)

