Ironic E-Mail

Not that I have anything against these guys, I’m on their list on purpose. But this particular solicition made me chuckle (but in a knowing and sympathetic way).

It’s for their Usability Seminar: Enhancing the User Experience of your Web Application.

Where I’ve circled and marked number 1, layered on top of “usability assessment” is a relatively … unusable? … link to forward the e-mail. At number 2, the unsubscribe and mailing address is layered over the image.

In all fairness, I know it’s really hard to debug HTML e-mails because most corporate environments give you access to just one type of mail client. We never did have the vaguest idea what Lotus Notes did with our promotional e-mails. Here I’m using the Mac OS X mail.app which, despite its benefits, is still a little obscure.

And at number 3, which is where I first figured something was wrong, the links to “register now” and to their home page don’t work — I get an “Invalid Request (Bad Header Name)” error. And I did want to register!

That one probably had nothing to do with my platform. Again, in all fairness, you don’t get to pick and choose when your server goes down. But oh the irony of it.