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76 Comments

1. Alan Bristow
   January 11, 2006 6:46pm

   Excellent, comprehensive test that I’m sure you ‘had’ to do in order to properly qualify your position on this subject.

   I am not surprised nor dissapointed. If folks are so tentatively hooked by the content in an email that the lack of complelling Flash is enough to stop them clicking through to a web page, then, are they likely to turn into useful visitors (buyers etc)? I suspect often not.

   It’s just SO nice to know that there is a choice between plain-text and HTML+CSS mail - for me, at least, the lack of Flash support is not a problem AT ALL. After all, isn’t it best to have the reader open a mail and get a feel-good-factor from the content, then if they click-through it is better to further impress them (exceed their “impresses-ness” expectations) rather than if they saw Flash at the get-go, then clicked through and perhaps had a flat response from just more-of-the-same?

2. marvin
   January 11, 2006 11:46pm

   Email is ment for Email (ASCII) so the less bullshit we can put in a mail the better.

3. Andy
   January 12, 2006 5:40am

   Have you done or do you know of a similar study that talks about the use of forms in emails?

4. Garrett
   January 12, 2006 7:19am

   I just pooped.

5. Dave Greiner
   January 12, 2006 8:14am

   Andy, we’ve done a similar but less comprehensive study on form support here.

6. Matias
   January 12, 2006 8:22am

   I¥m apologizes but i will write my comment in spanish because my english sucks.

   Actualmente uso Outlook 2000 y veo los emails que envio con flash. No solo yo, sino todos mis compaÒeros que utilizan el mismo programa. Es verdad que el Outlook express por default no muestra contenido flash, pero si setean opciones de seguridad si. Obviamente el los webmail como yahoo, hotmail o gmail el flash no se ve.

   Mi opinion no es a favor de utilizar flash en los envios de e-mail. Pero si conozco el target y se que la mayoria usa outlook o clientes de correo prefiero enviarlo porque el impacto es mucho mayor.
   Para que los que no ven flash puedan seguir entendiendo el mensaje uso una imagen gif animada como fondo en la misma tabal donde pongo el contenido flash. Y esta imagen se ve en TODOS los clientes de correo (excepto Lotus Notes, obvio) y en los WebMail tambien.

   Eso es todo (that¥s all)

   Gracias,

   Matias

7. Jim Amos
   January 18, 2006 2:30am

   I continue to be impressed by the quality of investigation you guys post, please keep it up. We really need to spread the word so that clients as well as corporations do not forget that content is king and user’s do not expect glitz and glamour in what is simply meant to be an informative invitation to engage in something outside the email app(!)

8. Mark Huot
   January 18, 2006 11:56am

   my 2¢: Mac Mail worked because the Flash was playing through QuickTime player.  Because the content area of a Mac Mail message is nothing more than rich text, which supports QuickTime on OS X, then it makes sense the Flash would play.  If you control click on the Flash, I doubt you will get the Flash Player popup, letting you set Flash settings etc, you should get a QuickTime control, text area specific functions.  Furthermore, because QuickTime player only half supports flash you probably can’t put too much fancy ActionScript in there or you’ll choke QuickTime.

9. Dave Greiner
   January 19, 2006 5:15pm

   Mark, I just jumped on our Mac and checked that out. You’ll be surprised to know that it was actually the Flash player that was playing the movie in Mac Mail. Control click bought up the usual Flash player dialog. It looks like Mac Mail offers full Flash support by default.

10. Edward McIntyre
    January 20, 2006 5:15am

    I just got a newsletter from Adobe with some kool animation in it. I was courious about how they did it and it seems that they exported a gif from Afrter Effects or Flash.

    It seems to be the best way if you want to animate your newsletter.

11. Bill Fant
    January 23, 2006 8:12am

    Thanks for the report…. VERY HELPFUL!

12. Gavin Botica
    January 25, 2006 4:18pm

    I was intrigued to see the way you implemented a “fallback jpeg”, by using PARAM name=img etc within the OBJECT tag. I was not familiar with this, I assume its only supposed to work in IE though?

    However, to test it out I ran the Flash Player Plugin Uninstaller, to remove all instances of the plugin from my machine, and then tried to view your newsletter. In both IE6 and FFox I get prompted to install Flash (no real surprise I guess), but If I refuse the install I just get a broken image.

    So I can’t see how the PARAM tag kicks in - can you elaborate?

13. Mike Harrell
    January 26, 2006 5:12am

    Dave…Obviously you did your homework.

    Having worked in the advertising industry in the past, it seems to me that you might be missing the big picture surrounding video email. If one takes the approach that email is just another method of delivering a message…whether text and/or video…then does it really matter who read the mail or watched the video? If you were to place an ad in any of the “conventional” sources of advertising such as television or radio, do you ever know for sure if your target was tuned into the station at the very instant your ad was played? The answer is “NO”. There is no way to know who read your classified ad; watched your commercial or even saw the billboard on the side of Route 66.

    However, from the little I know of the subject, emails offer an advertiser the ability to track who, when and for how long their message was viewed. Furthermore, if, as you say, an embedded link can take the viewer to a website to view the message, then isn’t that accomplishing the intended task? Isn’t that increasing the chances of that someone interacting with the website after all? On second thought, this just makes me just want to jump back into advertising again.

    By definition, advertising can be summed up with: “You can’t reach all of the people all of the time” and I see emails as fully complying with this fact.

    It is no more…or no less than just another way to deliver a message…text, video or otherwise.

    That’s my two cents.

    Happy days to all.

14. John
    February 1, 2006 10:23am

    One method to display the backup image with better results than shown here would be to place your Flash within a table and set the background image of the table to your backup image.  Be sure to give your table an absolute height and width, otherwise it will collapse on itself without the Flash present. 

    I have seen this tested on various email clients and see it work.  This won’t help the Flash content display, but at least it will degrade to something other than a blank spot.

15. Dave Greiner
    February 1, 2006 3:11pm

    Gavin, thanks so much for your insights and further testing. This technique was actually suggested by another designer, but it turns out the PARAM name=img within the OBJECT tag is in fact not well supported at all. We were under the false impression that this displayed a fallback image, but after further testing we can confirm this isn’t the case. I’ve updated the article to reflect this.

    John, that’s a great suggestion and one we got half right. We did include a background image, but made the mistake of leaving a blank space in this image where the flash movie was to go (see here), but we should have used that area to display a fallback image instead. You can see from the previews above that this background image did display successfully for a lot of email environments.

16. George A. Butt
    February 2, 2006 3:55am

    Anybody interested in using video email with integrated text and HTML images? Choice of input from webcamera or digital video recorder. Simple user interface.
    Web-based service app is available for low,low subsciption cost. Also available at low cost: -video internet messenger with up to 3 on-screen links, and LIVE webcasting, with instantaneous archiving. I will be pleased to provide details. Definitely not FLASH.

17. John
    February 2, 2006 4:28am

    Dave—
    The blank image threw me.  I looked at the test emails originally and saw only a white space and thought it was a rendering error, when in fact, it was your background image, but the wrong image (“noflash.jpg” instead of “bg_flash.jpg”).

18. Jason Cale
    February 3, 2006 3:16am

    A quick note on Mac Mail in response to it being quicktime or flash, html emails are displayed using the webkit that safari does .. it can be dropped into most apps, to gain the same functionality. So normally if it works in safari it works in the mail, so hence flash working. I wonder about svg’s :) .. type “mac mail webkit” to read more..

19. No VMDirect
    February 9, 2006 10:40am

    George-

    No one is interested in building your pyramid for vmdirect or helloworld whichever you want to call it.

20. Darren Candler
    February 10, 2006 3:20am

    On this test - did you all the flash file by URL or did you inline the flash file into the email ???

21. Jeff
    February 10, 2006 8:02am

    George—

    I would be interested. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Thanks.

22. Simon
    February 25, 2006 10:00am

    I’m very interested in the way that you have formatted the HTML to embed the Flash content. Can you post the code that you actually used as it sems that you laboring under a misunderstanding of how to force the display of a fallback image.

23. Simon
    February 25, 2006 10:23am

    I’ve just read the above posts in more detail and can throw light on why the fallback image did not display. You say that “<Param Name = img…” isn’t widely supported. Well logic dictates that if the OBJECT tag is stripped or blocked, it won’t be supported at all. (If the whole object is gone, why do you think that an email client will be able to distinguish a Param tag?). The CORRECT way to structure it is to supply the image as <img src=“etc”> within the object tag. Then, when the object itself is blocked, the image remains. This method works fine on IE based email clients (Outlook etc - if set to block Active X objects- will of course still throw a Security Alert) but Hotmail should quietly just display the image.
    I’d still like to see the code though to see exactly how comprehensive your test was.

24. Dave Greiner
    February 25, 2006 10:49am

    Simon, thanks so much for your feedback and suggestion. You can find the original test email here.

    Please let me know if you have any other thoughts in top of the suggestion to place the image reference within the object tag. We’re more than happy to modify the campaign, run the test again and publish the results.

25. Brian Cha
    March 8, 2006 4:23am

    Great article!

26. johnboy
    March 16, 2006 12:56am

    Great article - finally a nice definitive reference to point customers at.

    I posted this on an earlier thread before spotting this one but it may be more relevent here:

    “late to the discussion I know - but have you tried embedding the flash inside a PDF, you can include all the content you want in the PDF (including data gathering mail back forms that return xml) and send that out as an attachment.

    Personally i think it sucks but may be an easy option for those customers that insist on flash/rich interactive content in an email campaign, maybe better than having to walk away?”

27. nutmilk
    April 6, 2006 12:16am

    BUT I WANT MY FLASH EMAIL MAKE IT WORK AUGHGHGHGHGHHGHG

28. Pete
    May 3, 2006 7:45pm

    I agree with nutmilk. Can some big brained egghead please make this work. I am itching to put flash into emails.

29. Jon
    May 24, 2006 4:16am

    Can someone describe what they mean by “getting this to work”? It seems that no matter what you do, Outlook is going to show a security warning and Outlook is by far the most commonly used email client. It’s nifty if this works in Thunderbird, but it would have to be transparently flawless in Outlook first.

30. Al McCarley
    June 14, 2006 6:56am

    Anyone fancying passing this info on to Apple? I’m sure they could make good use of targeting Mac and Mail users with Flash emails?!? I’m suprised they haven’t already…

31. Joe
    June 15, 2006 1:32am

    I have used flash in emails in the past and as long as the user has activeX enabled in their browser, they will see the flash in outlook express. Appart from that, it’s pretty much a no no.

32. Magazin
    June 15, 2006 5:47pm

    Can somebody (Joe) point me out how or where to start building. I’m trying for years now making my signature into flash. Right now I attach a quicktime, a fine sollution only it doesn’t starts playing by default and shows the controller. And also I would like to stream instead of embeding the file. So flash seems a good option or is there some other sollution I didn’t catch.

    Code or or learning curve is much appriciated. (ps. I use a Mac).

33. mitch
    July 29, 2006 6:24am

    this article says one can use flash as a signature but if it is able to use it as a sig why cant it be used in the content…

    http://www.webreference.com/multimedia/flash/email/

34. Alicia
    July 29, 2006 12:33pm

    I also agree that email is meant for Ascii plain text, no Html nor Flash.

    Nowadays most email clients do not display by default images, nor Html nor flash.

    Also, I think each of us who has important things in email, should back it up regularly.  I used to do it manually by saving the .dbx files, until I found Outlook Express Backup Genie that does it automatically at regular times.

    I choused it over other because it can work with both MS Outlook and Outlook Express

    Alicia

35. Kim
    August 10, 2006 3:24am

    Mitch,

    If you go one step further on the link (http://www.webreference.com/multimedia/flash/email/) you included for using Flash as a signature and go to their reference page (http://www.standardgraphics.net/Pages/FAQsAboutAES.html), you’ll find that it is a very old article and that they don’t Flash anymore for the exact reason stated here.

    Kim

36. Prabhakar Kasi
    October 17, 2006 8:24pm

    Great Article

37. Andrew O
    October 19, 2006 7:07am

    anyone ever heard of a method called Flash satay? Apparently you can manipulate the object tag, well more like strip it down, to make it more accecptable across multiple browsers.

    Has anyone ever used this method and tested it in email?

38. Al
    October 20, 2006 2:45am

    The problem with Satay, as I see it (I haven’t tested it) is that the host strips out EMBED and OBJECT element via a strict RegEx set in the same manner they are killing other elements (HTML tags, CSS, etc., based on their rules). If someone does have the inkling and can provide a test as broad as this article’s, I’d love to see it!

    Great article, btw…

39. Oi
    November 14, 2006 4:17pm

    how are standard ecards created do they somehow embed the swf file in the email or do they provide a url back to their site were the swf file is contained

40. Pete
    November 30, 2006 9:58pm

    I also did some test and it can’t / shouldn’t be done (in my opinion)

    We send/recieve ecards quite a bit and it’s always just a link that you click to see the flash.

    Great article

    P

41. Pete
    December 7, 2006 12:39am

    Can someone describe what they mean by.

42. bradmatt275
    January 3, 2007 5:25pm

    It will be interesting to see if the vista mail client “Windows Mail” will be able to support flash in emails

43. Nate
    April 3, 2007 3:26pm

    As a video producer, you folks who posted that emails are just for Ascii plain text are showing your age. I have been emailing my clients attached Quicktimes for over a year. Yes, some of them email back the first time, so I have to tell these PC based dunderheads to turn off their scary spam filters. (reminds me of the Mac TV Spots) Content is content and if I can find away to jazz up your world with moving images and sound I will. Somebody is going to and I will keep looking for that app. Obviously from the content posted here, you dinosaurs are to old to dance any more.

44. Tony
    April 19, 2007 3:20am

    Also keep in mind, most spam and content filtering software (or hardware solutions) will reject or quarantine e-mail that contains Flash or JavaScript.

45. Sachin Sinnarkar
    May 28, 2007 6:25pm

    Gr8 David!

    U have done gr8 job. as U have done outstanding study to play SWF with desktop & Web-Based mail client.

    I also working Email-Marketing domain. I want to sent video mail. I have done too much R & D for the same. But….......result was same.

    web-based mail client blocked the <javascript>, <embed> and <object> tags so we must think beyond it. He David! let me know if you got any solution!

    Sachin Sinnarkar
    .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

46. Big T
    September 19, 2007 4:13am

    I already know what the answer is, but could someone shed a little bit of light on if using an to display the flash content is possible.

47. Big T
    September 19, 2007 4:13am

    ** <iframe>

48. Chris
    September 19, 2007 7:11am

    Honestly, I’m glad none of the email clients show flash. Because if they did, more spam sites would be using it, and I REALLY don’t want to have to sit there and download that much crap just to toss it in my spam box.

    I’ve had spam before, to the point where 3 out of every 1,000 emails were NOT spam. It usually took about 10 minutes to download all the emails. And they were text-only. If they had been flash + html + pics + text, it would take hours.

    So thank you for doing this test to show the truth about flash in email. I hope it prevents future spambuse.

49. Chris
    September 19, 2007 7:54am

    SMTP is for ASCII, plain and simple.  You can NEVER guarantee how it will look on the receiving end other than plain text.

    If you don’t like it, you can always create your own RFC, get it made into a standard and have it become as widely adopted as SMTP is.

50. Jason
    September 19, 2007 9:44am

    “Flash was built for the browser, and based on these results - that’s where it should stay.”

    Same could be said of html.  I’m not advocating sending flash emails, but consider that 99% of people are using outlook/express and that 99% of people ‘allow’ anything regardless of security alerts it renders your analysis pretty much worthless.

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