Neural networks, typography and layout: Digest of interesting materials about creating letters and working with email in Habrahabr

Today we decided to prepare a selection of the most readable materials on topics related to postal services, design of mailing lists and tips on writing the letters themselves. The selection includes both publications from the Pechkin blog and articles by other Habrahabr authors. Enjoy reading!

The following five publications scored more than 600 pluses:
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1. Stop checking Email with regular expressions.

Translation by David Kelis, who offered his critical view on the problem of validation using regular expressions. The examples are not entirely successful decisions and best practices according to the author.

2. The damn dozen of tips for beginner makers

Simple words on behalf of the developer who was involved in the server part, and decided to deal with the layout as an experiment. Tips are based on the author's interpretation of the lost leadership.

3. How to build a full-text search

Find answers to the question of optimizing the search mailboxes Mail.Ru. Material with examples and a fairly detailed description of the project progress was prepared by one of the company's developers.

4. 10 recommendations for html-layout of emails

No water, only examples of solutions. The first (and very successful) post of the author on Habré, supplemented with useful links and comments from community members.

5. Never check email addresses by RFC standards.

Another good analysis on the topic of checking the addresses of mailboxes. The RFC standard, its flaws and pitfalls are discussed. At the end of the post there are recommendations of the author.

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We decided to keep up with the leaders and prepared a rating of the most striking materials from our own blog on Habré, which gained more than 350 thousand views. From posts with the smallest coverage to the most readable publications of our blog.

6. Working with email: How to reduce the number of incoming messages to zero

Tiago Forte, the head of Forte Labs, a company dedicated to improving efficiency, wrote an article in his blog about how to start using this technique and reduce the number of incoming letters to zero. We have highlighted and translated the main points of this material.

7. Talk about Gmail: How did the popular mail service evolve

Compared to its competitors, Gmail appeared on the market not so long ago, but immediately became very popular. The material tells about his distinctive qualities, which were told by one of the engineers of the company.

8. How Easter eggs in email helped the company draw attention to its conference.

Five Easter eggs allowed Litmus to sell tickets to their conference on email design issues. This post is about using Easter eggs, which increase reader engagement.

9. Using media queries in the layout of letters: for and against

Nowadays, almost half of all emails are viewed from smartphones and tablets, for which media queries are used. Before diving into the world of web design and layout of unique email campaigns, you should take a closer look at this tool.

10. How the infrastructure of email services is built: The Pechkin Experience

More and more companies are resorting to the use of appropriate tools for creating and managing newsletters. Let's talk about the infrastructure of such services, on the example of the pechkin.com project.

11. Email and Security: Can I Secure Email Conversation?

The question of email protection was set by Quora users, and we translated one of the most interesting answers given by Bill Franklin, a former employee of the secure mail service Lavaboom (the project was closed in summer 2015).

12. Why is it so difficult to improve email

Themes of design and usability are among the most popular among Habr's readers. Our blog is no exception - in this article we talked about why it’s so difficult to offer something in the niche of working with email from a design point of view.

13. Layout of letters: 60 useful resources.

A selection of frameworks, templates, tools, tutorials, blogs, and research.

14. How-to: Typography in letter design

The existing possibilities for working with fonts in email, the basics of typography in the use of web fonts, and a little about the multi-column view without tabular cells.

15. How to clean up the mailbox using a neural network

An engineer from the USA, Andrei Kurenkov, in his blog talked about how he solved this task using a neural network, and we translated the main points.