HTML Template in Emails.

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MichaelC
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Re: HTML Template in Emails.

Post by MichaelC »

In that case. +1 to no options at all then.
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brunoais
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Re: HTML Template in Emails.

Post by brunoais »

Oh! I didn't know about such thing. In that case I agree with you. Sending in both HTML and plain text and not have any options on that matter seem to be the right answer.

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Pony99CA
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Re: HTML Template in Emails.

Post by Pony99CA »

EXreaction wrote:You can send an email and include both HTML and plain text in a single message. The email client will use whichever one it wants.
I know that, but that more than doubles the size of the E-mail, increasing the board's bandwidth use. Also, I recall using some E-mail clients where you end up seeing both the plain text and HTML E-mail (not formatted -- HTML text), but I suppose that could have been a bug in the client or bad formatting on the sender's part.

An ACP option of Plain/HTML/Either (user's choice)/Both (E-mail client's choice) puts the admin in charge. As for why an admin might force plain text or HTML on users, it could be for bandwidth (plain text) or branding (HTML).

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Re: HTML Template in Emails.

Post by Oleg »

The issue of emails taking more bandwidth is in my opinion irrelevant.

Any board should use order(s) of magnitude more bandwidth for page views than for emails.

I'm assuming the discussion so far covered notification emails only. Once notification emails are in html, how long will it take until admins ask to send bulk email in html as well?

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Re: HTML Template in Emails.

Post by Pony99CA »

Oleg wrote:The issue of emails taking more bandwidth is in my opinion irrelevant.

Any board should use order(s) of magnitude more bandwidth for page views than for emails.
True, but there's always the straw that breaks the camel's back. ;) Plus, when an ISP is determining whether somebody is a spammer, do they just count the number of E-mails sent in a given time or do they take bandwidth into account, too? If they take bandwidth into account, Web traffic would be irrelevant in that case.
Oleg wrote:I'm assuming the discussion so far covered notification emails only. Once notification emails are in html, how long will it take until admins ask to send bulk email in html as well?
Actually, I'd be more in favor of that. Styling and branding is more appropriate in a newsletter, plus the Admin already controls how and when such E-mails are sent. He has no real control over notifications (other than maybe disallowing them completely).

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EXreaction
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Re: HTML Template in Emails.

Post by EXreaction »

Current emails are in the 1-3Kb range; a normal page-view without extra images here is 100-200Kb, but down to as little as 20Kb using a local cache.

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Re: HTML Template in Emails.

Post by Pony99CA »

Do images linked in HTML E-mail get cached, too? In other words, if my notification E-mails include the board's logo, will the E-mail reader cache that (or use an image in the browser's cache)?

I'm asking because another thing to consider is the user's bandwidth. If user's have their phones configured to get E-mail from the same account they get their notifications sent to (like I do), if the images are not cached, that 1-3 KB text E-mail gets doubled to 2-6 KB for the text and HTML and then another big chunk for the image. (How big is the phpBB logo, for example?) That could eat into the user's data plan.

With more and more carriers in the U.S., eliminating unlimited data plans, that could be a concern, too.

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EXreaction
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Re: HTML Template in Emails.

Post by EXreaction »

Web mail clients probably would cache images linked via HTML since the web browser handles loading the page, but I do not know about desktop mail clients.

I don't think anyone is suggesting significantly changing the email messages to include significant amounts of HTML. I think the idea is all that would be done is to put an HTML wrapper around the text and put <a> tags around the links so the user can click them if their mail client does not automatically parse links.

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DavidIQ
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Re: HTML Template in Emails.

Post by DavidIQ »

EXreaction wrote:Web mail clients probably would cache images linked via HTML since the web browser handles loading the page, but I do not know about desktop mail clients.

I don't think anyone is suggesting significantly changing the email messages to include significant amounts of HTML. I think the idea is all that would be done is to put an HTML wrapper around the text and put <a> tags around the links so the user can click them if their mail client does not automatically parse links.
Yes that is the idea. Changing the email templates to be overly complex with many images and "prettiness" will be up to the board admin but I doubt many would do anything to notification emails and I don't think we should give them the option of easily changing them either. If they wanted to change the template then they would have to edit the physical file, just like they have to do it now.
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brunoais
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Re: HTML Template in Emails.

Post by brunoais »

EXreaction wrote:Web mail clients probably would cache images linked via HTML since the web browser handles loading the page, but I do not know about desktop mail clients.
In my case, I use thunderbird and it caches images according to its rules in the headers (thunderbird uses a browser window of gecko, just the way firefox does).
DavidIQ wrote:If they wanted to change the template then they would have to edit the physical file, just like they have to do it now.
Yeah, that's also my idea. Obviously, extensions would be able to change the e-mail templates too, right?

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