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We have invested heavily in security training for our user base, specifically to sensitize our people to potential phishing emails and the dangers of clicking links contained in emails. So when the announcement email below went out, alarms bells went off (users reported the email to SecOps).

And to be fair, this email is shockingly bad. It looks unprofessional and crunchy, and requires the user to follow a link that involves a lot of codes which looks like at attempt at obfuscation. My IT people are concerned that telling users to trust an email looking this bad will erode our gains on the security front.

Can this please be improved?

  • If there is no logo, please have a graceful fallback layout
  • Can the announcement (or at least part of it) be shown within the email body? This would give more context/reassurance for someone to trust the link
  • I realize clicking the link is probably the mechanism for tracking who has read the announcement, but couldn’t that be achieved by downloading an image? Or even track in the back end: if a user has read the card since it was sent as an announcement, then they have read it.

 

Hey @murray sorry to see the trouble here! What email client are you using? 

This is Outlook desktop client. Not sure the exact version that the screenshot is from but almost certainly 2019 or later.

Interesting! Thanks for confirming. I’m unable to replicate this in Gmail using a workspace without a logo, so at first glance, it seems like this could potentially be email client-specific. I’ve escalated this to our Technical Support team to see if Engineering will consider it a bug. Thank you for flagging!

Hey @murray, I have some updates for you! 💫

If there is no logo, please have a graceful fallback layout

The Support team confirmed this is, unfortunately, due to the lack of formatting support in Outlook’s desktop app, which hasn't kept up with industry standards. Outlook is aware of this and displays the message at the top of the email, “If there are problems with how this message is displayed, click here to view it in a web browser.” for this reason. If you click the link, does the logo shift to being a normal size and the “Open announcement” text shift to appearing like a button? Viewing your emails via the Outlook web app is the suggested workaround as it will render everyone’s emails as the sender intends.

 

Can the announcement (or at least part of it) be shown within the email body? This would give more context/reassurance for someone to trust the link.

I recommend logging this idea as a new/separate product feedback post. The text of the announcement message is displayed in the email today (in the screenshot above, it’s the text “Receipts policy has been updated and clarified.”). Do you mean, it would help to see some of the Card content appear in the announcement email? Or, is clicking the announcement “I read it” button something you want users to be able to do while viewing the email? It will help our Product team to have a little more context from you around what’s motivating the ask.

 

I realize clicking the link is probably the mechanism for tracking who has read the announcement, but couldn’t that be achieved by downloading an image? Or even track in the back end: if a user has read the card since it was sent as an announcement, then they have read it.

Currently, clicking the link in the email to open the Card in Guru counts as a user view of the Card (Open rate). This is a different metric than when the user clicks the “I read it” button for the announcement (Read rate). Measuring these two metrics can be helpful when analyzing the performance of the announcement. To do this, view Announcement Insights from the Card the announcement was sent from by clicking on More Options > Card details > the Announcements tab > then clicking the #% read it. There, you’ll find the Open rate and Read rate along with the list of names of users the announcement was sent to, the date they last opened the Card, and the date they clicked the “I read it” button.

Also, if you’re interested in having the user opening the Card count as reading the Card, we have this product feedback post you can upvote: 

 

I hope this information is helpful! Please let me know if it surfaces any other questions for you, too - we’re here to help.

 

Thanks for the quick response.

For the missing logo scenario, can you explain why the email client should make any difference? If there is no logo, there should be no logo displayed in any email client. The template should not even include it… right?

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