Video email

Video email means an email built around a recording. In practice this almost never means an attached video, because mail systems will not carry one: Gmail and Outlook.com both cap attachments at 25 MB, which a minute of screen recording can exceed on its own.

What is actually sent is an image that links to a page. The recipient sees a still frame with a play button, clicks it, and watches on a web page. Nothing plays inside the email itself — mail clients strip the markup that would allow it — so every claim about video playing in the inbox describes a linked image rather than an embedded player.

That constraint shapes what makes these emails work. The still frame is doing the job of a subject line, so it should show a face or something recognisable rather than a slide. The surrounding text should say what the video is and how long it takes, because the reader is deciding whether to spend that time before they click.

The measurable advantage over a plain email is what happens after the click. A linked video page reports whether the recording was opened, how much of it was watched and whether the button beneath it was pressed, none of which an ordinary email can tell you.

The text around the video does more work than most senders expect. A subject line that mentions a video and a first line that says how long it runs both raise the chance of a click, because the reader is deciding whether to spend the time before they have seen a second of it. “Two minutes on the migration question you raised” outperforms “Video for you” reliably enough to be worth the extra thought.