spugbrap’s blog

This has been going on for way too long. It definitely started after Google released the new interface for gmail, but it didn’t happen immediately. Now, I’m not blaming Firefox, and I’m not blaming Google. I’m 95% certain that it’s the result of conflicts between one or more of my extensions. I’m always changing up my extensive (hehe) lineup of extensions, and many of those extensions dramatically impact the way the browser works. I love web development extensions, debugging tools, power toys, etc.

Thankfully, I recently read an entry on Mishoo’s blog, which started out describing some [presumably completely unrelated] Firefox performance issues, and ended with a short, positive review of Safari. I decided to give it a try, for curiosity’s sake. I tried Safari when the Windows version was first released, and I remember not being impressed, to say the least. I don’t remember what I didn’t like, but I do remember uninstalling it immediately, so it must have been pretty bad. I don’t use Opera every day, but I do respect it enough to keep it installed and reasonably up-to-date.

Anyways, I tried the newest version of Safari, version 3.0.4, and was pretty impressed. The interface was attractive, simple, and fairly intuitive. Just what one might expect from Apple, I guess. I’m not a big Apple fan; I do not own an iPod or an iPhone, I don’t use iTunes, and have never owned a Mac. But even I know that Apple has a reputation for attractive, simple, and intuitive products.

Using Safari hardly felt different from using Firefox, to me. Almost all I do miss my Firefox extensions, though, and Safari’s Bookmarks menu leaves a lot to be desired. But it is fast, and I almost all the websites I’ve been to have looked and acted just fine. Best of all, it doesn’t crash when I close gmail!

So, where I had been using Firefox for 99% of my personal browsing and Internet Explorer for 1%, I now find myself splitting that 99% pretty equally between Safari and Firefox (and IE for 1%, since some sites just demand it).

One of these days I’ll probably try running Firefox in Safe Mode, and if closing gmail doesn’t crash it, I’ll start disabling one extension after another, until I find the culprit. For now, though, I’m content using Safari part of the time.

I like Mozilla Thunderbird, for the most part, but I hate the way it handles opening attachments.

It asks whether I want to Open with [select box with apps registered to open the file type], *OR* Save to Disk. 99% of the time, I want to do BOTH.

If I choose “Open with”, it puts the file in a temporary directory, and opens that temporary file with whatever app was selected. In this screenshot, that app is MS Word. So, I can go ahead and read the document, if that’s all I intend to do with it. As soon as I close Word, I can’t assume that the file will continue to exist, since it’s in the temporary directory. Anything in the temporary directory should be placed there with the assumption that it could be deleted at any time.

If I choose “Save to Disk”, I get a standard Windows “Save as…” type dialog (unless I specified in the options that I wanted attachments to always save in a particular folder, without asking), and it just saves it to disk.

I usually want to save it to disk, to the place where I want to keep it, AND open it in my preferred application, to read it immediately. Why do I have to choose? Does anyone know of a Thunderbird add-on that lets you both save AND open an attachment?

I was looking through my Gmail Spam folder today, as I do once in a while, to make sure nothing is in there that doesn’t belong. Among the actual spam, there were a couple of legitimate messages (nothing important though), including the official Google Earth newsletter (Yes, Google automatically marked one of its own newsletters as spam. I went ahead and clicked “Not Spam” on that one, since Google Earth is a cool program), and the MySpace newsletter.

My focus today is on the latter. After taking one look at it, I agreed with Gmail’s determination that the damn thing was spam. It consisted almost entirely of images (49 IMG tags!)! None of the images had alt tags, and 26 of them were linked to myspace pages (the rest were spacers/decoration).

It also included one little line of text at the very bottom:

Unable to view this newsletter? Click here to view the MySpace Newsletter profile page! :)

Gmail does not display images in messages marked as Spam, so what I saw was 3 browser-window pages of image placeholders. On the left side of this post, you can see 3 screenshots of the message, scrolled one page at a time. The screenshots are linked to their full-size versions, but I think the miniature versions and my explanation make it clear enough: This is utter garbage!

I wasn’t even the slightest bit compelled to view the images, or to click the link at the very bottom to view it on their website. Gmail was right to mark this crap as Spam!

Last week, I posted about my observation that, Gmail snippets include ALT text for images in HTML emails.

This information won’t matter to most people. But, I was thinking that anyone sending email promotions/customer service alerts/etc. might benefit slightly from this knowledge. I wouldn’t suggest putting a LOT of effort into it, since I’m sure the number of people who read their email in the gmail web interface, with the “show snippets” option turned on (I think it’s off, by default), is not large enough to warrant it, but it wouldn’t hurt to consider this tip: get right to the point!

What I’m suggesting is to put the main idea of the email in the first line of the message body (or better yet, in the subject line!). Or, at least put a reasonable hint, so the recipient can tell–at first glance–whether the message is relevant/useful to them.

You don’t get very much space to work with, here, so make it count! With my gmail window maximized, in 1280×800 screen resolution, with normal font sizes, I can see exactly 123 characters of [Subject]+[Snippet]. Usually, my window is not maximized, so we’re probably talking more like 80 characters.

I’m not in the email marketing business. I am just an ordinary consumer/geek. But I do recognize that, when reading my email, I follow some predictable behavioral patterns.

If I see a subject from Barnes & Noble like, “Two 25% Off Coupons Inside”, and have been thinking about buying a book/movie/etc., I will probably click it. However, if I see “This Week — Coupons, Anne Lamott, Tracy Chevalier, More”, I almost definitely would not. Kodakgallery.com rarely compells me to click, because they use titles like, “March Gallery Exposure: Winds of change!” Officemax.com and Dell usually mention specific coupon types/values in the subject line, which I like.

Nobody seems to be taking advantage of the first line of their emails, though. Looking through my gmail right now, the only snippets that are useful *at all* are from personal emails, and a newegg.com RMA confirmation (which shows my invoice # in the title AND the snippet, and my RMA number in the snippet). Most of the marketing emails seem to start with things like “Having problems viewing this email? Click here.”, which makes their gmail snippets worthless.

Another reason to get right to the point, with a compelling title and first line, is for mobile users. When reading email on my mobile phone, I would rather not have to scroll through several pages of menu bars, company logos, icons, greetings/small talk, etc. I’d like to see the important information first. If I don’t see it right away, and don’t have a very specific need for the information, I will most likely skip reading that message, and may or may not try to read it on my laptop later.

Brevity becomes extremely important when it comes to sending information (such as bank alerts) via SMS. Bank of America does not know this. Every time I get an SMS alert from them, it’s at least 80% fluff, and usually gets broken up into 3-4 smaller messages by my wireless provider (which, if I was not on a text messaging plan, would cost me $0.15 per message, to receive). I’ll probably post more about that another day.

While checking my email this morning, I noticed something interesting about gmail’s “show snippets” feature. It wasn’t something that jumped out at me or anything. In fact, it didn’t really register in my mind until after I’d already clicked to view the message. The words “Bank of America Customer using a laptop” seemed a little strange. So, I went back and looked at my Inbox again, and saw this snippet:

This seemed like an odd bit of text for an email notifying me that a direct deposit just posted to my account. Sure, I am a Bank of America customer, who usually uses a laptop to access Online Banking. But they shouldn’t know that, so I clicked on the message again to see what they had to say about using laptops.

Well, the message, itself, showed no signs of the word “laptop”, but the large header image in this HTML email had a picture of a laptop in it. That’s when I realized that gmail was probably showing the ALT text for the header image! To verify this, I used gmail’s “show original” option, to view the full message source. Sure enough, the header was made up of several images, each of which had ALT attributes, and the header images appeared before any of the actual message content. The ALT text for the laptop image was, as expected, “Customer using a laptop for Online Banking”.

Apparently, to generate message snippets, gmail strips the HTML out of the message, leaving behind the ALT text from any IMG tags that appear in that code.

That makes some sense, since the ALT attribute provides a textual representation of the image content, for accessibility purposes. However, I’d bet that most of the time, images in HTML emails are not meant to be part of the content… Most of the time, they’re probably things like company logos, navigation bars (linking to different parts of a company’s website), list bullet icons, pictures of your [family member/friend]’s children, etc.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about Bank of America’s email header, or gmail’s snippet generation method. I just thought this was interesting behavior. I have a few ideas for who might benefit from this information, and how they might use it, but I’ll have to save that for another post, tomorrow.