Images, again

It’s a new year, but an old problem. Email with unloaded images.
Sure, you should be including critical content as text, and/or including alt-text as a normal part of your creative design process, but at the bare minimum you should look at what your mail looks like without images.
The last thing you want to do is send out email with just one strong call to action – the unsubscribe link.

Inbox__63056_messages__8_unread_-2

With images loaded it was a really nice year summary mail, with a link to web content they’d clearly spent a lot of effort on. Without images, it’s just a call to unsubscribe.

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More info about Gmail image caching

A lot of people are discussing the new Gmail image caching around the web.
This doesn’t yet appear to be rolled out across all of Google’s network, so some people in different parts of the world are reporting different behaviors. This is leading to a little bit of confusion, as folks are reporting things like seeing multiple opens for a single image. These reports are clearly accurate, but may only be an artifact of a slow rollout across the network.
There are a couple bullet points I think are important.

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Creative HTML Table Abuse

There’s an old-school ’90s HTML design trick that dates back to the dim and distant past before we had decent layout control in CSS. That’s “slicing” – chopping a large image up into multiple parts, then reassembling them in an HTML table.
If you slice your images in an email and the end user hasn’t loaded images what will they see? They’ll see a rectangular box – either empty or with the image alt text in it. And, if you set the background colour for the table cell, they’ll see that – but only when images are turned off.
If you’re sneaky, you can do clever things with that.
Images off:

The same mail with images on:

Or like this, with images off:

And the same mail with images on:

(There’s more discussion in this reddit thread about it).

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SpamAssassin Problems

The default SpamAssassin configuration considers any date far in the future to be extremely suspicious, which is pretty reasonable.
However, as @schampeo points out, it also seems to consider any date later than 2009 to be “far in the future”.
That means that until the SpamAssassin folks roll out a fix, and that gets deployed by SpamAssassin users pretty much all email will get an additional 2-3.5 spamminess points. That’s likely to cause a lot of content-based blocking over the next few weeks, until fixed rules are deployed both by SpamAssassin users and by all the various spam filtering appliances that use SpamAssassin rulesets.
(If you’re a SpamAssassin user, add “score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0” to your local.cf file to disable that rule).
EDIT: Mike has some more background on the bug.
EDIT: Fix it out on the spamassassin homepage.

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