Thoughts on Email

Post from June 10, 2008 (↻ May 31, 2022), filed under  (feed).

Email was, is, and will stay the web’s true killer application, but spam, top-posting, incompetent use of newsletters, and the HTML email problem mean serious challenges. I can’t but share a few thoughts.

Spam Won’t Die

We all know that. While Symantec says that 72% of all checked mail was spam in 2007, Spamhaus talks about 90-95%, both anticipating a growing amount of spam. Spammers must make a lot of money out of this stuff, at least enough money to obtain the means to bring down Blue Security in 2006. I vividly remember this time as I used to be a Blue Frog user (whose system worked, at first). What spam requires are even more sophisticated algorithms as well as eventually teaching people how to cope with it, as spam handling is one important aspect of the information management skills needed today.

That Spamhaus’s spam definition suggests that “the recipient’s personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients” can probably be applied to non-spam mails as well


Top-Posting Must Die

May I hand over to Joe, please? Undoubtedly, Joe is very effective convincing people to use email the right way. I am concerned about this as well for many, many, many people seem to just hit “Reply” and pollute inboxes by words already spoken, in a way that translates to “answer, answer, answer, question, question, question, followed by n answers before other questions or statements” (unlike, if this sounds too familiar, “question, answer, question, answer”). Some people seem to enjoy receiving forwarded conversations written this way, to figure out what was and is going on by reading from bottom to top
 not quite, from bottom to not-quite bottom, from anywhere in the middle to somewhere higher—you name it. Stop top-posting and learn how to write email.

The top-posting issue exists since the rise of email. The WardsWiki has some ancient tips online to “trim your posts”, as does Scott Norwood in his pre-2001 rant on quoting practices. People should read these documents rather than e.g. trying GMail’s new “signatures tweaks” widget that puts the sender’s signature between answer and question (and even removes the standard dashes indicating the signature)
 I don’t feel sorry saying that.

Some Newsletters Deserve to Die

Newsletters! The best ones are mine and Jakob Nielsen’s. Cough đŸ˜‰ Seriously, newsletters, and I refer to newsletters in general, continue to be poor in many respects, violating the simplest rules and ignoring other best practices. I quote Jim Sterne at Usability Week 2005:

Email is:

  • the best bang for the buck,
  • the easiest to produce,
  • the cheapest to send,
  • the easiest to destroy your credibility.

HTML Emails Should Die

HTML mails are special. Regarding implementations, the situation got slightly better over the last years (I still remember 2003 when I briefly joined a major German newsletter specialist, back when work with email clients was true horror), but still there are many issues. I recently emphasized that less is still more, here meaning that focusing on plaintext mails might mean less work and provide better results, and I encourage to keep that in mind in this place as well. No matter what the Email Standards Projects accomplishes (we should all appreciate their efforts), better save the time and avoid sending HTML emails altogether.

This is “less and more” in action. I could have focused on discussing HTML mails from a web development point of view, but I didn’t want to bother. Plaintext often does the trick just perfectly, and thus there is no need to complain about ever more and more broken implementations, longer development times due to the mĂ©lange of document structure and presentation, reuse problems, recommendations whether to send or host mail images, &c. pp.

Toot or tweet about this?

About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on September 30, 2021.

I’m Jens, and I’m an engineering lead and author. I’ve worked as a technical lead for Google, I’m close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for O’Reilly. I love trying things, sometimes including philosophy, art, and adventure. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.

If you have a question or suggestion about what I write, please leave a comment (if available) or a message. Thank you!

Comments (Closed)

  1. On June 10, 2008, 23:37 CEST, Dave said:

    I’ve never understood the impassioned statements I often see against top-posting. Top-posting makes sense to me, and reading top-posted conversations has never caused me any problems.

    I want to understand, though, so if you know of any strong explanations (maybe ones that have an example or don’t have name-calling), please share. : )

  2. On June 11, 2008, 0:47 CEST, Dominik said:

    You will never win the war against Top-Posting as long as all common E-Mail clients offer this solution by default.

    I was not part of the newsgroup generation, where this movement pretty much comes from, so I never felt that strong about it. I understand the reasoning but how can one even bring up the energy to convert people to use it.

    Funny sidenote: I actually tried replying to a business contact (who uses Notes) last week, directly putting my replies below the quoted sections of his mail. Guess what, he didn’t understand and sent it again, telling me that our mail server must be broken because it did just resend his original mail.

  3. On June 12, 2008, 13:32 CEST, Alan Gresley said:

    Because it’s hard to follow Dave đŸ˜Š

    I’ve never understood the impassioned statements I often see against top-posting. Top-posting makes sense to me, and reading top-posted conversations has never caused me any problems.

    @Dave

  4. On June 12, 2008, 13:43 CEST, Alan Gresley said:

    @Jens

    I will certainly bookmark this page and refer to it.

    I am a administrators /owners of 4 mailing list, the first one from 2000. I saw the initial start of spam (2001) and the continuous rise of spam and the technology closely behind trying to combat it.

    I agree with you totally about top posting and HTML emails. I would like to add that the question, answer, whatever pollutes list archives, especially from subscribers that receive digest.

    Re: Digest No. 2008-0006 đŸ˜Š

  5. On June 13, 2008, 11:10 CEST, Jens Oliver Meiert said:

    Dave, I guess Alan already replied đŸ˜‰

    Dominik, it is a client thing as well, but correct use of mail requires some work (which is quite worthwhile and, well, professional). The root problem is probably education again, even though it doesn’t require much to handle mail correctly.

    Alan, cheers! And of course, one argument that didn’t really come up is the unnecessary waste of bandwidth. But instead of writing

    And, will you join us later?

    Yes.

    people still like to send the former 20 mails along, together with dup signatures and the like.

    (Where’s Joe!)

  6. On June 14, 2008, 15:11 CEST, Andrea Creviola said:

    Great article, I have already referred to it a few times. Although it’s hard to predict what will the future hold in the war with spam (personally I think it will continue for quite some time) the top-posting phenomenon should be fought at all costs. It’s really one of the oldest and most annoying problems with email. As far as HTML mails are concerned, it seems to me that in a couple of years more sensible standards will be developed and using HTML will be as good as plain-text emails.

  7. On August 1, 2008, 23:53 CEST, lazar said:

    This post has a ‘die’ theme. Why such negativity đŸ˜‰

    Spam won’t die, but may get more expensive with better filtering:

    Currently the lowest rate seems to be about $200 to send a million spams. (
) But filtering out 95% of spam, for example, would increase the spammers’ cost to reach a given audience by a factor of 20
. (paul graham on spam)

    and another good idea by him:

    About 95% of spams contain links to web pages. If everyone who received a spam actually followed the links in it, the traffic would be a heavy burden on the spammers’ servers. (stop spam)

    But than again, how many people are actually going to open spam mail and read and click on links. so maybe not such a good idea