I used to love newsletters, and one of the first serious online publications I had was an e-mail newsletter. Through the years, I’ve used newsletters to promote stories, sell stuff occasionally, but more importantly to get that direct connection to actual people. So let’s take a look at a recent Amazon newsletter I received, and see how it stands, shall we?

Right. This is before I’m allowing images in the e-mail:

Not so pretty with those code snippets, right? At this time, I’m not interested in the content at all. If it wasn’t sent by a reliable source, I would’ve deleted it, or perhaps even marked it as spam.

Let’s enable images and see if it gets any better:

That’s better, although not very pretty. Truth to be told, I’m amazed that Amazon’s newsletter renders so poorly in Gmail. Traditionally, rendering HTML in webmail accounts is something hard to do, but there are several HTML newsletter that are getting better results. Maybe they’re not doing as many cool things as Amazon does, but still.

Also worth noting is that I used to publish an e-mail magazine (called Kong, on videogames, in Swedish) with a strong visual style, including graphics and - for an e-mail newsletter - advanced HTML. It rendered well enough, so there’s no real reason for Amazon not being able to accomplish this.

Then again, didn’t blogs kill all the interesting newsletters already, leaving product pimping and spam to fight the uneven war on our attention?