Lately I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend in emails I get from Starbucks. For some reason the images wouldn’t load in my Gmail on Chromium, even when I used their link to view the message in my web browser. I would always have to fire up Firefox just to drag the link into a tab to open the page. I finally got sick of it and sent them an email about it on Saturday.
The emails I get from My Starbucks Rewards always come in with broken images, even when I click the link to view it in a browser tab. The issue occurs in Chromium (16.0.912.75 (Developer Build 116452 Linux) Debian wheezy/sid) and Google Chrome (15.0.874.121), both with my ad blocking software disabled, but not in my alternate browsers: Firefox (9.01) and Opera (11.60). I really hate having to open another browser just to see the images in your emails.
Yesterday I got a response from them that made me wonder how much I want to keep giving Starbucks my business. rather than copy and paste their response I took a screenshot so you can see I’m not changing what they sent.
Yes, you read that correctly. “Unfortunately the website and other elements such as the e-mails we send are only designed to work with the correct coding that Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox use.” I sent back a response pointing out that it’s 2012 and not everyone uses Firefox or IE, and I don’t expect a reply. I actually had to take a bit of time to make sure that I wasn’t coming off as a geeky jerk, and I planned on just letting the matter drop completely but last night I decided to share their email with our readers.
When I tried to get a screen capture of one of their broken emails the emails displayed properly, but that’s no guarantee that they’ll always display properly. Consider this post a word to the wise.
