For increase readability, we should left-align the emails for community center updates. Some of the authors I follow are sending blog post length updates to their community, and I give up after a while because it’s just too difficult to read center-aligned.
Images are not rendering, either, so there must be something missing in the embed? I either see no image, or a broken image link, from community posts.
Thank you!
I came here in part to mention this. I can’t understand why they chose to center everything. Plus, since the whole community post (minus images) is sent, I’ve had readers tell me they thought they saw the whole thing and didn’t even realize they were missing out on images. It looks like a complete email, and not a post to the community from a reader’s perspective. There’s no reason for the to click the “Go to Post” button at the bottom.
Another issue is I had a reader reply to the email. They got back a support ticket confirmation from Ream (they forwarded it to me at my posted email address). They never got an answer about the ticket and I never received their email. That’s a communication lost if they hadn’t contacted me another way.
I like that readers get email notifications of community posts, but perhaps just including a short excerpt with a link to read the rest will get people to the community where they can interact via comments rather than missing out on images and trying to reply vs. comment.
I agree that users should get an except or maybe just the Title of community posts.
As a reader, I definitely love getting the content delivered to me. But as an author, I want them to come interact with the subscription page: react or comment.
Especially if they aren’t getting the entire community post (ie, images), I want them to click and go to the post itself to see the entire thing.
Center align doesn’t bother me, but it doesn’t make sense either. It should match the post itself, IMO.
Yes. I agree that it shouldn’t be centre-aligned. I follow a couple of authors and it’s weird and a bit harder to read when it’s centre-aligned. I didn’t know about the image problem.
I follow several other authors and the community posts serving as long blogs are def hard to read all centered. I didn’t know about the image not showing up in email until I got a post from another author that made NO sense because she was referencing an image I couldn’t see. Like @CPNight, as a reader, I love that community posts are delivered by email, but as an author I want readers to come over to my page so I can encourage engagement.
This is another area of Ream that will be seeing some major updates. So you all know what’s on the roadmap:
I know a lot of things got bumped in favor of the discoverability update (which I can’t complain about, honestly!) but do we have any idea when email formatting and including images in emails will be ironed out? As it stands now the emails look very amateurish which impacts brand credibility. Thank you!
I too would love to know when the email display update is scheduled for.
The center aligned email is so hard to read.
Still waiting for any kind of update on this - I know there are many important things in the mix, but I’d love some kind of acknowledgement about a time-line for improvements. Thanks!
I hate to keep posting on this thread but we’re not getting any kind of response or even acknowledgement, and that is very frustrating. The most recent update on this is from Oct. '23, which was six months ago.
When can we expect some kind of resolution to this? Sending poorly laid out emails filled broken image links is not a good way to increase reader engagement. 
Yeah I ended up sending an email directly to support in January, and the team seemed surprised to hear about the images not appearing in emails.
@Ream can we get an update on the community emails? Left-align, make the images work, shorten content so readers are enticed back into the community? I know there’s another thread about making the community more like a Discord, and if that happens, I suspect readers will want to filter to who is creating the post, but in the meantime, goodness gracious, can we get a well-formatted email that’s easier to read?
Hi KimBoo,
Thanks so much for keeping this thread active. We realize that for a lot of authors current email notifications being sent are a pain point for authors.
This is on a priority update list that we have, and the date was pushed back slightly due to the Google security update in Feb that sent a lot of companies’ emails into limbo.
I don’t have a firm date to offer, but this will likely be bundled with another major update coming in 2024.
You can follow what we’re working on by checking out this help guide:
We’re committed to updating this guide and https://updates.reamstories.com/ regularly, as well as sending author emails whenever a new feature is released.
Thanks!
Bobbie
Support Team Lead
Thank you for the update. Please continue to let the dev team know that this is definitely a priority for many of us, esp. those who share images on community posts. Thank you!
Thanks for the update. Please help the team prioritize this. We can’t assume users are sitting on the Ream platform. Part of the draw was that patrons/members would receive content via emails. If the emails are poorly formatted, it looks bad on the author, not the platform, because readers don’t know how little control we have.
This is so true. I have tried highlighting and setting to left align, but it does not work. I send excerpts and interviews, so it’s hard to read.
When a reader replies it comes to my email but doesn’t show up on the post on Ream. So no one else knows there were responses.
I’ll be honest, it is INCREDIBLY frustrating to see all the exciting updates about new features when this VERY BASIC aspect of email notifications is just waved away with “hopefully soon!!!”
Left aligning emails and embedding images in them is the lowest bar of formatting. I am simply flummoxed that it’s been nine months of updates to the platform since this matter was first brought up and it remains an outstanding request. It would help a lot if we could get a promised time frame on when this will be addressed.
Yeah, this is one among a few core usability issues that’s getting less excusable the older Ream gets. I made a lot of allowances for Ream being a babby-platform, as it seemed clear the team launched with a minimum viable product. A year on and it’s… still a minimum viable product.
It’s not even minimum viable for me. They have proven over and over they aren’t tackling these basic needs that should have been part of any launch and the lack of communication about when they will get to them (but hey! open a bookstore!) means I’m in the process of changing to doing my own subscriptions on my website. So sad as I’d hoped Ream would be the solution and save me so much time.
Hello all, it’s Michael, here. We really appreciate your feedback. Left alignment in emails is necessary — and we will be improving this. We are a small team with many updates as well as tent pole features (which are the ones you hear announcements about) to make to the platform. One reason we haven’t automatically added images to emails is because many authors are sharing sensitive updates + images to readers on Ream that they only want to be available to paying readers. In this instance, many authors will not be okay with images in community posts also being in emails (and we have also received this feedback). Taking a lot of feedback from the community into account, we know there needs to be a solution here. Right now, the best solution seems to be to give authors the option to hide images in emails if they want, but to also give authors the option to display images. Given this, we have been trying to figure out the best way to proceed that helps give flexibility + control to as many authors as possible.
I appreciate Ream is a small team with a big to-do list (not to mention, I assume, its fair share of fires to put out). I would just like to suggest that the Community Posts tool should be considered one of those tent poles. It’s one of the features that sets Ream apart, imo, but as-is, as a whole, it’s leaving a lot to be desired. The centered emails is only one part of it.