By the way, Really Good Emails is being built on Assembly as a community product. This means, its open sourced and revenue is split between the people developing it. You can see some of the improvements to the site everyone is planning:

https://assembly.com/really-good-emails/posts/latest-priorit... https://assembly.com/really-good-emails/projects/29

Which revenue?

I suppose I have become too old. In "my day", HTML was just beginning to creep into email, and there was the beginnings of a huge religious war to keep mail in plain text.

I guess we lost. But my mail clients will be configured to send mail in plain text until the end of time.

So, I get that a lot of people prefer html-email to email (text/plain), and I'm not going to argue with that. But if these are "really good emails" -- do they embed all resources in the email in order to be off-line friendly, and privacy-friendly? Do they supply good, standards-compliant text-parts? If not, they certainly don't fit my definition of "really good emails".

Judging by the fact that there's no preview for text-only view, I'm guessing not...

I was hoping for comedy. Instead I got the emails I mark as spam/unsubscribe from. :(

Exactly what I was thinking. Seriously, the overall vibe I get from many of these emails is either "email from some service I subscribed to, sending a generic greeting/reminder", or "outright spam". Definitely nothing that would strike me as important.

I was expecting more of a focus on content of emails instead of design.

What makes these good emails? Are there some metrics on the engagement/response that these got or is it...?

I'm confused what the take away from this is supposed to be.

I like the idea -- a browsable archive of quality email layouts -- but most of the ones I looked at were pretty mediocre.

If you'd like to see a better submission process, it's an open-source product on Assembly: https://assembly.com/really-good-emails. There's been lots of talk about just forwarding an email to an address and having the community vote on what they think are great emails. It also made $1350 last month which is split between contributors so there's some financial incentive for you to jump in :)

How did it make $1350 in revenue? I can't see any revenue-generating aspects at first glance... it just looks like a user-submitted gallery site to me.

"Sponsored by Mailchimp" is absolutely a revenue-generating aspect.

I agree, I think it's mostly just what the admins are getting themselves. There's a way to submit emails [1], but maybe the best model is to be the hacker news of email design (open submission, upvotes etc).

[1] http://reallygoodemails.com/contact/

Comments and voting and community features are really hard to pull off. You can't just throw an up vote button and wait for good stuff to float to the top.

Hey folks, I started Really Good Emails to get more exposure to what people were doing. I'm hoping to have good critical dialogue about email campaigns on a forum more like hackernews or Product Hunt at some point soon. What else is it missing at the moment that you'd like to see?

Are these "good" from a design aspect, or "good" because they convert?

Like most of these things, they're good because whoever is running these sites thinks they're good. They like pretty pictures.

There are a lot of people out there who want to try to justify their tastes by making them sound like they're rooted in some kind of scientific consensus but it's rather rare for that to actually be the case. Designers are especially vulnerable to this and the way that industry jumps on the bandwagon and self-righteously snubs anyone who doesn't do so with them is amazing.

To some of us, a good email is 1-2 lines of pure text, and we'd rather go without the bells, whistles, and tracking images.

They're not text. They'd be better as text.

These are meh. GitHub does email right.