Gmail snippets include ALT text for images in HTML emails
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.
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