In the time I have been in email marketing I have seen literally thousands of email campaigns pass along in email clients

In the time I have been in email marketing I have seen literally thousands of email campaigns pass along in email clients, from shameful to brilliant and from questionable to thought provoking. After seeing so many of them you get sort of a hunch what could be wrong or right with one within a few seconds after viewing one (with images on, in this case). But I never view a message once: always take a second or even third look, to see if first impression will stay or will change. The rare, medium or well done points to how ‘digestable’ an email is: does it view and read easy, does the message actually come across to the viewer? If a message is in the rare category, it is not necessarily a bad thing: it could mean people have put in effort to make it worth reading instead of glancing, which could mean no fancy graphics and more text as content, but that text is presented in a good manner. Well done in this comparison doesn’t (have to) mean it’s a great message: just that you can digest the content in a matter of seconds, so to speak.
To put my thoughts into perspective, here’s an example of the last category: well done. It’s a recent message from Ralph Lauren showing new Spring collection pieces: