Why teh HTMAL emals?
TypePad now sends HTML email for comment notification. I can’t remember the last time I felt so totally distant from anything blogging related. I wouldn’t have been much more surprised by “TypePad now sends comment notifications written with a quill pen on the cured skins of Irish babies.” Can anyone explain this puzzle to me?
Phil: My read of the linked article suggests they’re sending multiparts, not just HTML. Did my eyes deceive me?
Nope, that’s what they say. And if I hold my head just right (twisted to the left, with a slack jaw), I can almost imagine not wanting to see any of that nasty raw HTMAL in teh notification email, trusting absolutely that my blogging service provider had successfully filtered evil, matched tags, and escaped things to just exactly what the commenter intended, so I would want rendered HTML rather than HTML source in text/plain. Then, when I get into that position, I seem utterly alien to me.
The reason I get comment notification email is because I’m the ultimate editor of what gets posted here, not so I can read the comments without having to load a web page. I’d no more want to do my editing with rendered HTML than I’d want to be a general contractor who hires an electrical sub to do the wiring, hires a drywall hanger to cover it up, and only then checks it by flipping a switch and plugging in a lamp.
Also? Since I moved all my list subscriptions over to GMail, probably between four and five nines of the HTML email Thunderbird has seen has been spam. That suits me fine.
It may be just exactly what their market wants, and was clamoring for, I don’t know. I do know that MSN Spaces (in Japanese) didn’t make me feel that apart from something blogging-related.
The main operative difference for comment notification mail right now is that we can use real links instead of printing URLs. The change was mainly driven by the other mail we send, like for registrations, guest author invitations, gift certificates, helpful guidance for users in trial, etc.
Engineering-wise this has been a pain in solely my ass for a couple weeks (and not a fun couple of weeks) so I definitely want to get it completely done so I can work on something even more satisfying for me and TypePad subscribers both. :P
So you can use links, or so the comment body can contain links (or both)?
I get plenty of text/plainified email that started out as HTML email with links: they look like <https://www.paypal.com/login.cgi>http://1.2.3.4/scammin.cgi when I see them.
If I leave a comment with
<a href="http://www.goatse.cx">http://www.slashdot.org</a>, is the notification email going to tell the site owner what he needs to know? Bloody ”no screenshot for you” announcement, now I’m going to have to sign up for another free trial, just to look, even though I should just trust you and your customers to work out what you want.(Dude, combining being sick and going to the DMV? Wait, maybe that’s a good thing: you know it’s not going to make you feel any worse.)
So the links to your entry etc that TypePad puts in can be links, yeah. Real links is another thing that makes a bigger difference in the other mail, I guess (the long-ass confirmation key in guest author invitations, for example).
Now that I check, we’re escaping the actual comment text. You still see the HTML in the comment text as brackety code. That doesn’t prevent anyone from cloning the HTML and putting bad links in the comment text–or for the ”Edit comments here” link for that matter. I don’t know what would, and that’s endemic to HTML email.
On the implementation side the project was really about all the emails. I suppose the announcement only mentions the comment notifications because that’s the most customer-facing mail. ”We prettified the email you get when you change your email address! Woohoo!!” would get us yawns at best. The comment notification mails were included because we were trying to convert all the mail, and it makes them easier to localize. There are good marketing reasons to brand the mail better too but I can’t speak to that.
(I figured I might as well go to the DMV while I was off work anyway, but by the weekend I only got sicker. In retrospect it was probably a bad idea, but I wouldn’t’ve gotten my car registered yet and don’t know when I would, in spite of it being long overdue.)
I hate it when I’m wrong like that.
Looks reasonable, and moderately safe. I do think the edit link on top, MT-style, is a tiny bit safer: I’d end my spam comment with ”Edit comments at” and the URL for my homograph for typepad.com, where I’d run a clone of the comment deletion app, and then a bunch of newlines to shove the real link down-screen, trusting that people wouldn’t remember that it should be the word here linked.
Pasc’s covered the highlights, but the other thing probably worth mentioning is TypePad’s user base is, um, somewhat different in their blogging background than you are, Phil. :) My mom like HTML mails a lot better. ”If it has their logo, it looks like it’s coming from a real company.”
I guess this is where the conversation veers to phishing and all the other wonders of email. Meanwhile, I wonder why more mail clients (GMAIL, HELLO?) don’t let you specify a preference for the plaintext part of the email in a multipart message.
Or just make it so bloody hard to tell: I spent quite a while in Thunderbird, trying to get back to viewing the HTML part, before I finally realized that the View menu, Message Body As, is apparently a preference setting, rather than the ”do this to this message right now” that it should reasonably be. That left me so tired and crabby that I gave up on whatever I was planning on doing long enough that now I’ve forgotten what it even was.