Show HN: HTML for Mail

by dshipper • 14 years ago

23 20 14 years ago

dshipper9• 14 years ago

Hey everyone. We built this in a day yesterday by repurposing code from our current startup (Airtime for Email). We're hoping that people find it useful, and that eventually it will be able to help us generate qualified longtail leads from the SEO. We're really new to selling B2B and inbound marketing and I'd love your feedback :)

slater• 14 years ago

Really not fond of giving out my e-mail address, so here's the direct link for the app:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/eyeredux/assets/HTML+for+Mail.zip

dshipper9• 14 years ago

Fair enough :). Are you saying that in general you don't give your email out, or are you saying you think the value prop for this particular app is too weak to give an email out for?

sdfjkl2• 14 years ago

Download buttons are expected to lead to files that you can download.

I don't want to give my email address out unless I actually want to be emailed by you (with something I care about, not with what you think I should be reading). On terrible sites that have not realized such basic facts but have software I really want (VMware for example), I use bugmenot or mailinator. Thereby this sort of thing only serves to reduce the amount of people that try your app and annoy those that want it bad enough into giving you a fake email. And a couple poor sods that get spammed by you later on, either because you decided to spam them, because you took improper care of your contact database or because your company got sold and stripped for assets (customer data = valuable).

jason_shah• 14 years ago

Impressive and wise repurposing. When you said "longtail leads from the SEO", Dan, do you mean that eventually something like this page would rank well for queries like 'html for mail' and related terms (and push leads and traffic to Airtime)?

Assuming that's the case, it may help to make more reference to terms like 'Apple' and 'Mac' (on the page and in your HTML) that people may include in a query when looking for something like this. From glancing at the source, it seemed like adding those sort of terms and others from using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) might be useful. Eventually it would be a great case study to see data and how well something like this works for you in driving qualified leads.

dshipper9• 14 years ago

That's exactly what I meant by longtail leads. Thanks for the advice, I'm going to spend some time tonight going over keywords to optimize it as much as possible.

We're definitely looking to make this into a case-study for inbound marketing if possible, so hopefully in a month or two we'll have some reportable results. Thanks again for the feedback

SeoxyS• 14 years ago

HTML email signatures need to die. There's nothing more annoying than getting an email with a huge, colorful and distracting signature.

Signatures should be plain text and a few lines at most. Apple got it 100% right here in limiting the software. Please stop including entire resumes in signatures.

Here's mine, by the way:

    ---
    Kenneth Ballenegger
    www.kswizz.com

dshipper9• 14 years ago

Thanks for the comment! I agree to some extent but using HTML doesn't necessarily mean a gaudy signature. For example your two line signature could be reduced to one line by linking your name to www.kswizz.com.

I don't think that we should limit use of a technology because it could be used to create something ugly (almost all technology can be used that way) but instead look at what kind of beautiful things it can make.

prakashk• 14 years ago

    your two line signature could be reduced to one line by linking your name to www.kswizz.com.

What if the recipient is using a non-HTML mail client?

sdfjkl2• 14 years ago

"Sig dashes" are the closest to a standard signature delimiter and consist of two dashes followed by one space and a newline (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3676#section-4.3). They are widely supported by email and usenet software (Pine, mutt, Gmail, etc.)

mdesq2• 14 years ago

Access to the site is blocked by my employer due to a perceived security threat.

"...this web site ( http://htmlformail.com/ ) has been blocked because it has been determined by Web Reputation Filters to be a security threat to your computer or the corporate network. This web site has been associated with malware/spyware."

Maybe something you want to track down, in case the site somehow became listed in a malware database. Sometimes removing sites takes manual effort.

dshipper9• 14 years ago

Oh wow thanks for the heads up. I wonder how that could have happened - we just launched the site today.

I'll definitely look into it. Is it possible that a previous owner of the domain used it for malware?

mdesq2• 14 years ago

Could be. I've seen hacked sites get cleaned up and two years later still be stuck in these databases. Integration with some antivirus programs can make it so that large numbers of people are effectively blocked from visiting the site.

mnutt• 14 years ago

You can use HTML in Mail.app signatures already; you just have to copy some HTML from your browser and paste it into the signature field.

But considering how bad Mail.app's signature UI is, this is pretty handy.

dshipper9• 14 years ago

Thanks I'm glad you found it useful!

nrj• 14 years ago

HTML is not for e-mail. That's what web browsers are for.

dshipper9• 14 years ago

I'd like to respectfully disagree. I think it's akin to saying "web browsers are not for running applications; that's what operating systems are for" 10 years ago. Email has a huge amount of potential to be used as a medium beyond just plain-text and I think that's a trend that we'll start to see manifesting itself more significantly over the next few years.

Show HN: HTML for Mail

Related Stories