What if email clients were more like web browsers?
The other day I had an idea, how about putting a survey or signup form within an email. You could then submit straight back to a website therefore taking a needless step out of the process. And the more I thought about it the more cool stuff I thought I could try out with ajax and all kinds of funky stuff…
..but after a quick google I found out about the shocking state of email clients when it comes to handling html, damn!
37 Signals have a great post about the problem here: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/604-navigating-the-html-email-jungle
So we know there are problems and a solution to the problem is pretty much out of our hands (Thanks Microsoft) but just think of the cool things we could do if email clients had the same functionalities as your current web browser.
- You can amazing affects thanks to DOM scripting with prototype, scriptaculous and jQuery, ajax posting a response to a survey or unsubscribing from a newsletter, all without ever having to leave your client and getting a fade effect or a reply directly from the webserver too.
- Flash is installed on 98% of web ready computers, so why not use them in email clients too for video, slideshows and audio (although the last one could be damn annoying), there would be no need for quicklook integration in apple mail if you just streamed a song or movie directly from the web.
- Magic CSS could become common place and beautiful, inspiring emails wouldn’t be such hard work (and so thin) and there could even be a Zen Garden of emails (Zen Mailbox perhaps?)
- You could start your journey into a website without even trying, the link (or button) to a site could be from a form pre-filled with your info, and then you wouldn’t have to fill out the same form again, or voting/digging directly from your client.
- iframes could be used to give a window on the site the email is talking about, productivity goes through the roof!
- And developers would not have to resort to dirty hacks to get some pretty basic stuff to work across every client/platform.
And sure, there may be some email clients that support some of these it but without proper standards there is little point due to the majority of users not having these clients.
So get your act together email client developers (looking at you MS Outlook team) and give the world more awesome emails!
A List Apart also has some tips if putting css into emails: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssemail
Think also of all the needless junk we would have in our mailbox. Emails take up size. Imagine having to wait 4 minutes on a crap net connection to download some crap rather then simply having a simple link etc. so i can decide wether i want to view it or not.
Heck, I completely hate HTML in emails as well. Plain Text all the way.
stabani on February 13, 2008 1:34 am
It sounds like a great idea but I’m with stabani, html emails are bloat and the prospect of having an inbox full of them is scary. It’s slow enough accessing my gmail via imap, then to add on loading times for complex HTML emails and you’ve turned what should be a snappy application into a dog.
However, for internal corporate applications, these types of emails are brilliant and they behave in exactly the way you describe. Lotus Notes (hoch …. spit!) has been doing this for years, you can send forms to email clients so that a workflow process can be advanced without anyone actually having to visit the application. I have no experience doing the same sort of stuff with MS Outlook but I’m sure it’s possible.
The key difference is that you know what client your email is going to arrive on and therefore you can program accordingly.
Kieren Johnson on February 13, 2008 9:23 am
Anyone can send you big attachments right now, the wonders of having support for proper html and embedded and seperation of presentation and content (unobtrusive css and javascript) would mean that you don’t actually download any extra data (video, music, pictures, css, javascript) until you actually view the email.
All that would arrive in your inbox was some html content with href’s to media on the web.
More like getting a webpage sent to you, but of course you’ll get the crappy developers with their inline styles and javascript ruining the party for everyone but then you get the same stuff on the web too.
Andrew on February 13, 2008 12:11 pm
No mention of the Email Standards Project? This is the definitive way to move the issue forward.
Allowing JavaScript in emails is a potential security risk. DOM scripting could manipulate webmail interfaces as a XSS attack, and dodgy CSS selectors might cripple an interface too. That, and all the tracking spammers would include to detect if my email is read etc (which would be more powerful than the good ol’ spacer GIF methods used presently).
Nick on February 13, 2008 2:33 pm
What Nick said. There are too many risks involved. If I had a client that allowed XHR traffic or Flash in e-mails, I’d burn it with fire.
nitro2k01 on February 28, 2008 8:26 pm