Aside from the AI angle, there’s actually another way this weird bug can manifest.
If you’re following best practices and sending plaintext alternatives with your HTML email, then some mail clients will use the plaintext for the summary snippet and render the HTML when you open the email. So if a developer copies the success templates to the failure templates but only updates the HTML and forgets to update the plaintext alternative, then you will see this exact behaviour. It’s also pretty tricky to catch when manually testing because not all mail clients act this way.
The article doesn’t rule this out. Most of these emails are templated out in some 3rd party email service. It is extremely plausible that the author is unaware of the text email content.
If someone had a rejection email then we could check this. But
Reading the article is most improper on this here orange website. You’re supposed to read the headline, and imagine what the content of the article might be.
Yes, I did. My point is that the author might be jumping to conclusions. It is far more likely that they introduced a bug in their content than it is that a bunch of email providers who haven't changed in a decade suddenly released the same buggy AI product without fanfare.
If you’re following best practices and sending plaintext alternatives with your HTML email, then some mail clients will use the plaintext for the summary snippet and render the HTML when you open the email. So if a developer copies the success templates to the failure templates but only updates the HTML and forgets to update the plaintext alternative, then you will see this exact behaviour. It’s also pretty tricky to catch when manually testing because not all mail clients act this way.