It’s Turkey Day and apparently time for another entry in the Email Hall of Shame. Today’s honoree is MySanAntonio.com, the website for the San Antonio Express-News.
My mail reader is setup to not display images by default. As a result, here’s the entire email I saw in my inbox:
Let’s just start by saying “WOW! LOOK AT ALL OF THE EXCITING CONTENT HERE!”
More seriously now, there is a reason why people have been saying “Make proper use of alt tags” in your email. In this email, that hasn’t been done. So, what do we see? We see the alt tags for MySanAntonio.com itself and it’s tag line “Brings You the Latest.” But, then there’s nothing until we get to the footer. So, the footer is the exciting content.
The footer for this email consists of information required by the CAN-SPAM Act, and they don’t even get it exactly right. They appear to offer several classes of email, but only allow you to opt out of the list named “mySA – Advertising Email Offer”. Perhaps they consider all of the rest of their mail to be transactional?
Not only that, but the piece proclaims full compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. You don’t have to look very long to find people telling you that this is a bad idea.
Also, you can’t see this from your vantage point looking at a screenshot, but they also have javascript in the mail:
