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www.youtube.com/bestbuy - Musician and Best Buy employee, Keith Parsons, rocks his Best Buy holiday campaign audition.
38 Comments
- captaindan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9My biggest HTML-related email annoyance is from Outlook users, all of whom seem to think it's appropriate to create a signature with italicized bold 24-point type, usually in green or pink.
Don't get me started on background images. - richardyork, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Don't mean to downplay this. It looks cool. It sounds great in theory. Unfortunately CSS is quite unpredictable in email, and speaking as someone with a great deal of experience with both CSS and email, I wouldn't recommend using CSS in this way. Keep the styles simple. Stick with *inline* styles. Don't use embedded style sheets in mail. Clients like hotmail and certain other email services have been known to clip headers and remove style sheets. Also, embedded style sheets belong between the head tags, so this solution could be very unpredictable, since that's where most browsers expect style sheets to be, here the embedded style sheet appears in the body. To ensure your email will be readable to the most people, stick with inline styles.
- inactive, on 11/04/2008, -1/+6Why are so people so afraid of HTML email? Is it because you can easily disguise a "legitimate" Microsoft email and ass-clowns who think 3904832904832@no-ext.com is a legit Microsoft email address?
Plain text email has its purposes, but so does HTML email. How do you expect people to emphasise specific points in an email quickly? Use *asterisks like this one*? Or go even geekier and _do this_ ? Stop kidding yourselves and living in the "terminal world".
Plain text is great for system generated emails like registration, forgotten passwords etc. HTML email is also great for the business world, marketers and lots of other purposes, sadly one of those being for phising.
Just don't dismiss HTML email because you've been using plain text since the 1970's and all these "kids" are now using HTML email without realising the benefits of plain text, believe me, I know what they are. - linuxrebel, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7One thing few have mentioned here. The shear cost of HTML e-mail. Take a look at a 100 word message. Now send it too yourself as text then as HTML. As HTML (and this is the simplest of HTML messages) with no additional formatting it can be as much as 4 times the size. Then add in the embedded fonts, CSS files javascript etc (yes I've seen it.) and you can grow to 30-40 times the size of a simple text message.
How this affects cost I'm sure you can see. Extra cost in time spent getting it looking "Just right" when it won't look the same on my box cause I don't have the same version of the same e-mail reader you do. Costs in bandwidth. Yes the additional cost to send a 200k e-mail vs a 20k e-mail is trivial, but when you take that times hundreds of thousands of e-mail a day, I'm spending a ton of money every day just to receive your crap (or block your crap) that I could be spending on any of many more pressing needs. In short HTML e-mail is for (IMHO) myspacers and jacobpellegren, not for someone who is serious about communication. - mrWoot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I believe this can be done with any client. Just make sure when you send emails, you sent them via HTML _NOT_ plain text.
- MikeSD34, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4captaindan:
And don't forget those signatures put in by yahoo and hotmail accounts that is essentially completely spam.
You look at it thinking it's a user signature, and it's an ad. - adamsitting, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I agree. I think making emails, along with web pages visually appalling is ridiculous. Images? C'mon, aren't those just for children?
- boredzo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4And it's dead.
- davidirock, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Allot of real mail is html too. Like "email conformations" and love notes are best in html.
- mattwestm, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5text email FTW
- skynetos, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6Stick with plain text. It worked great 30 years ago and is still the best.
- ronaldpoi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I've used plain-text email my entire life, but if this works (and it works well) i'll have a very good reason to switch... i'll do some test sending me css signatures to other accounts (either pop using different software or webmails)... if all of them catch the css right, then i'll switch...
- XSforMe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I dont know why so many people dug parent negative. Most mail filters (including spam assassin) are usually set to penalize HTML mail formatting.
- bmw@, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3> HTML email is just unnecessary.
Hey, HTML web pages are completely unnecessary too. Who needs to see anything but plain text rendered in a Courier face anyway?
And why do we bother typesetting books in all these fancy-shmancy layouts and fonts? Screw that! Single-column Courier rulez! Think Underwood typewriters.
There, that will have fixed it for ya. No more pointless decorations or style. Unadorned facts from now on ... - Boondoggle, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3You are confusing "useless" and "unnecessary"
- stray, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4HTML mail is 99% useless.
- adamsitting, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2So, do we need an inline html version of this, or is the embedded css going to work with most email clients?
- arizonagroove, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Agreed. HTML email is just unnecessary. Most emails are sent as if they were plain text anyway so the HTML portion is just a waste of bandwidth and disk space.
Also you have no way of knowing if the reciever has a mail client that is capable of rendering the HTML part of the message (I know a lot of people who use pine) and a lot of people, including me, set their email clients to ignore HTML formatting in received messages. I also set mine to send as plain text only. - paulmetzger, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3So should the web be text files with hyperlinks? Talk about wasted bandwidth. How many CSS styled HTML webpages do you view a day compared to the number of emails you send and receive?
Do myspacers have ass-ugly websites? Yes. Should the rest of the web be denied styled markup because of them? - jacobpellegren, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Awesome tutorial, the difference between this and sending an HTML email is, that if they don't have HTML emails enabled, they can still read the signature, because well CSS is HAAAWT! Thanks for this AWESOME tutorial!
- vuke69, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3With a possible 1% margin of error, HTML mail is 99% useless.
- Midnightbrewer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2You meant appealing, didn't you?
- linuxrebel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@paulmetzger
Now you are asking the equivalent of should hybrid cars be banned because Intercontinental jet aircraft cannot use hybrid technology. The point is that E-Mail is not a web site. Saying that I have to be forced to receive your overly bloated content load because if I don't your website won't look good is inane.
I also didn't say anything about the types of web pages on myspace.com I instead referred to myspacers. Myspacers are a type of individual, related to but not the same as Valley Girls, and Dell Dudes. I understand the old debaters trick of bringing in tangential points that are connected only by a word. But please the argument is concerning the bandwidth costs of non productive, and as such undesired additions to e-mail. Not as to how when or where you set up your web page.
Oh and BTW if you do design and build sites outside of myspace you would know that there, the proper use of javascript, css, and Xhtml can save bandwidth. When a technology is correctly applied to the medium it is designed to enhance it's a boon. E-mail is not a web page. - gaehl, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Its updated now with an inline version.
- deBeuk, on 10/12/2007, -7/+7People that send HTML email should be shot as a traitor at dawn.
- coolbru, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I think it's all very well having an email client in which you can choose whether to read the plain text or HTML parts of a message, but in the case of gmail instead of giving you that option, it trashes the HTML to the point that it won't really work at all, and presents the resulting mess instead, which is of no benefit to either the sender or the recipient.
Some corporate mail filters as sold by BlackSpider and Star Internet have unbelievably poor processing of HTML parts. Star have a filter that ignores the text part and does a conversion (which doesn't know about divs or tables, so it usually results in random rubbish) of the HTML part instead, and converts linked images to attachments. The result is an unnecessarily large, unreadable message with a bunch of out-of-context attachments. I'm surprised they don't add a signature saying 'We don't know what we're doing', and I can't believe that some large companies actually pay for this service.
BlackSpider 'defangs' HTML parts by deactivating inline styles (by renaming style attributes). The thing that's funny is that they let through document styles untouched, gaining nothing, but trashing appearance. Note that this is also the complete reverse of what HotMail and GMail tend to do. Yet another case of cluelessness.
It doesn't help that corporates often don't have a clue themselves. I know a London law firm of over 1,000 employees that uses a 'file://' URL in their standard (HTML) email signature, and it's still there after I've told them about it several times. Maybe they're trying to subtly turn away IT clients. - SanityInAnarchy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I'll second that.
Things email should not be used for:
1. Attachments. Unless you created the file yourself, and you only intend to send it to one person, you're better off sending them a link. It shouldn't be too hard to find some web space to host that link.
2. HTML. Ok, I can see using simple HTML like bold and italics, but even that is unnecessary. What bugs me are the HTML emails being sent around that are 30x the text version, and add absolutely no functionality. What bugs me here is the insane redundancy. At least with a website, 90% of the unnecessary presentation stuff can be re-used per-page, but with email, it has to be re-sent each time.
3. IM or phone replacement. After a certain point, we need to communicate in real time.
4. Anything secure. If you aren't willing to learn to use PGP, please avoid sending me things like my social security number via email. It also makes very, very little sense to send me a download link to something I purchased-to-download over email -- it's no harder to pirate, easier, in fact, since someone could be intercepting my email.
5. Controlling any program, even one that does email. It's hard enough to learn a new commandline interface, even harder when Mailman and the like make you do it over email. Web pages are good at interactivity. Email is horrible at it. - paulmetzger, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3should digg be in pure ascii?
- Z_Man, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2is it gone? must be down, there's a db connection failure... is there a mirror anywhere?
- genetic, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2eh i just just my gmail from a browser now. for years i used a client. now all I have is one gmail that receives my forwarded email from all my other accounts. it does what i need and i dont need no creppy client
- lonelycanuck, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1amazing
I just wish I could use a bigger pic, but im not sure how to code for that - adamsitting, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1oops. *appealing
- tripfactor, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Hey can you send me that really long url in plain text so it will break over 3 lines please? or should I just "Click Here". No one can deny that the ability to send your grandma/neophyte a HTML formatted URL in email is a very good thing. All of the Pine users should go take their Geritol and quit pining for the bleeding edge days of ARPANET.
- spin-docta, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I already used it for two of my email accounts
a very biz like signature too!
thanks dude! - ismhackett, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0sweeeeeet
- darksided, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2WTF. This site is sooooo down. Can somebody please give a quick description.
- skynetos, on 10/12/2007, -14/+4Oh yeah, because sending HTML mail is the cool thing to do. Sounds like something a Mac user would do. :-P This is why I send all HTML mailI to my SPAM folder.
HTML mail == SPAM
Plain text people! Thanks. - spacebar14, on 10/12/2007, -21/+3I give this 2 hours before its front page. I have no idea what its about. I just know. It's Kevin Rose.
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