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The format of the digest emails has changed and it seems to violate the core ideas behind SE's layout, that content takes up most space. The HTML formatted email looks like this:

enter image description here

where I have helpfully circled the 75% of wasted space that could be filled with more info from the questions (in fact it's even worse - we don't even need the "flair" of the site next to each question).

Quoting Jeff Atwood on a "bad forum design":

Based on the original size of those screenshots, only 18 percent of that forum thread page is content. The other 82 percent is lost to signatures, avatars, UI doohickeys, and other web forum frippery that has somehow become accepted as "the way things are done".

Can we please put more content in these emails?

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  • Related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240767/…
    – Fish Below the Ice
    Commented Oct 10, 2014 at 16:12
  • @FishBelowtheIce absolutely related, but in the other question they want the old style back. In this question I'm just asking to remove the flair and whitespace, slightly more specific but I'll understand if they need to be merged!
    – Hooked
    Commented Oct 10, 2014 at 16:14
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    I totally hear your point that you don't like the white space, but I want to point out that 1) email is not a forum, and 2) we didn't remove any content from those emails; they just have a new skin that didn't exist before, so I'm not really sure what you're asking when you ask for "more content".
    – Laura StaffMod
    Commented Oct 10, 2014 at 19:13
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    @Laura Less whitespace is more information-density is less irrelevant content, compact content.
    – bjb568
    Commented Oct 10, 2014 at 21:06
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    @Laura How about remove the content and replace it with more text from the question? For example, the last question in the email truncates with ..., this could be replaced with more text (and a larger font) at the expense of the whitespace.
    – Hooked
    Commented Oct 11, 2014 at 0:24

1 Answer 1

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I think there's a variation in philosophy regarding the emails here.

You seem to be viewing emails as a quick way to get content from the site(s) you're interested in, so you want as much density as you can have, with full-text questions taking up as much of the page as you can.

Now, I'm clearly not an employee of Stack Exchange, nor am I directly knowledgeable about their decision-making on this sort of thing, but this is my guess. I suspect Stack Exchange views these emails as a quick way to promote content from the site(s) you're interested in. In essence, this email is just a newsfeed of the latest headlines, meant to draw you back onto the site to read the full question, comments, and any answers that have been provided. The content of questions isn't meant to give you everything you need, but rather it's there just because otherwise we'd see a lot of emails that are just a list of questions like "Help me with a SQL issue," "Weird error when I build for x86," etc., and that wouldn't draw much interest.

As Laura said in her comment above, no content was removed from the emails, they were simply redesigned to fit a more modern standard, not to mention to look more like the site.

And remember, in your suggestion to include more content, that they have to worry about many devices, and keeping emails small. It's less and less of an issue as time passes, but content providers still don't want to bloat receiving inboxes with huge emails, nor is it worth anyone's time to make an email newsletter like this responsive to work on all sorts of devices.

Long story short, by doing emails like this, they're inviting click-throughs to the site, and promoting a consistent feel end-to-end. A win-win, for what the newsletters are actually meant to do.

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  • 2
    Couldn't have answered better myself. Nicely done (except this: we have tried to make it somewhat responsive - the limitation is the mail clients themselves).
    – Ben Collins Mod
    Commented Oct 13, 2014 at 3:08
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    I was going to post an answer, but you took the words right out of my mouth :)
    – Jin Mod
    Commented Oct 13, 2014 at 3:31
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    You know, I start suspecting that you're either a secret SE employee or sock of existing employee, based on your answers! :D
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Oct 13, 2014 at 16:28
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    "they have to worry about many devices, and keeping emails small" Then why did they make the emails much larger, both visually and in terms of data (13kB new, 3kB old, both counting base64 encoded)?
    – svick
    Commented Oct 13, 2014 at 16:34
  • Can't say that the new mails became smaller. Do I need to have all the banners/ feedback links / various unsubsribe links with every mail?
    – Arno
    Commented Oct 14, 2014 at 15:08
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    Does Stackexchange need to pull attention from someone who has purposely subscribed to get these mails (not newsletters!)? I don't think the questions are a good place for advertising.
    – Arno
    Commented Oct 14, 2014 at 15:17

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