Locality Switch

I’ve got a big problem: Email. I use email for everything. If it needs to be communicated, chances are I’ve used email for it. Forget phone calls, face to face conversations, or anything which allows you to communicate emotion. Email is my answer to any communication requirements.

The thing is, I’m probably the person who needs to convey emotion the most! I can be sarcastic at times, and use wit in strange ways. When I talk with my friends, I use sarcasm and they know I am being sarcastic. Thing is, you really can’t convey emotion and vocal tones through a written email!

The way an email is read all depends on the person who reads it. I could send the same message to fifteen different people, and they could all interpret is differently. This is a massive problem. When I think to be a nice email has been interpreted by people as just plain nasty. I’m really not a nasty person, and I don’t want to be. But when 90% of communication with some people is through email, then really it isn’t hard to see why some people think I’m not being nice to them.

What do I do about it?

Scott H Young hits the nail on the head in his blog post, “The 7 Bad E-Mail Habits that Make People Want to Kill You“:

3) Wrong Medium

E-mail works best for direct and non-time sensitive information. Conversations, discussions and anything that requires a heavy amount of back-and-forth should be done on the phone or in person. Trying to use e-mail to have these conversations can be slow, time-consuming and painful.

The solution is to bridge the e-mail gap when you recognize you’re wasting time with it. Ask the person if you can discuss the issues in person or on the phone at a specific time and date.

I’m using the wrong medium. If I want to be sarcastic or witty, I need to do it elsewhere. Somewhere which allows an exchange of emotions and laughs. Somewhere, such as a telephone. Or a face to face meeting. Something; anything!

If I want to use email, I need to be direct and to the point. No wit. No sarcasm.

I’ve been playing around with MailChimp, which I am thinking may be used for a monthly member’s email at my local station. MailChimp, I have found, does a very nice job of allowing me to add images into a predefined template and write some content for it. However, what if I want to code my own emails?

Writing HTML to be displayed in email clients could be one of the riskiest things I ever do. Even more riskier than deploying a site written in Apache Tomcat (I never got along with that beast)!

Luckily, MailChimp has a nice little guide to help me out. It’s entitled How To Code HTML Emails, and contains advice such as this:

An HTML email is nothing but a web page. That’s it. I’m sorry if you thought there was more to it than that. So if you can code your own web page, you can code your own HTML email templates. There is a little catch, though. You have to code like it’s 1996 (I’ll explain later).

One little catch?

Do they even remember what the web was like in 1996? Incase you have forgotten what the web in ’96 looks like, there is a handy guide avaliable for you:

the technology was different in 1996. Although Internet Explorer 3.0 could run Java applets and inline media, Netscape Navigator could not, and in any case nobody felt comfortable doing anything more complicated than making a few animated GIFs. Additionally, very few web designers had even the most rudimentary of aesthetic sensibilities, and nearly half of them were clinically retarded. The internet in 1996 looks like it had been created in its entirety by a panel of 13-year-olds with Geocities accounts who had about half an hour to spare each night before bedtime.

From: https://www.msu.edu/~karjalae/internet96.htm

If you follow the link to that page, you will see some beautiful screen shots of the web in ’96. Wow!

Why would MailChimp tell us to code like that? It’s pathetic! Sadly, the safest way to code emails is to code like it’s 1996. Sadly.

Mail clients haven’t caught up with the rest of the world. Tables are the way to go, because email clients love to strip out half of your code, including CSS! I forgot the last time I wrote a page using a table for layout purposes – why are emails so backwards?!

There is the Email Standards Project which works “with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email”. Hey, they even publish a report on the status of each major client. Not surprisingly, Lotus Notes and Outlook 2007 are the worst, along with Gmail!

Their testing is based on their own Acid Test.

Let’s hope email clients can catch up with the rest of the world, and stop behaving like Internet Explorer 3.0!