Is HTML E-mail Still Evil?

Charlie Campbell asks: "My boss is pretty adamant about getting HTML newsletters to our clients; and, I'm pretty adamant about finding an alternative. I can understand the benefits in HTML mail from a designer's (mine) and marketing standpoint (that of my boss); yet, based on foreseeable issues with recipient software, mail filters, dial-up connections, etc. I feel that the risks outweigh the benefits. We've all heard this a million times... but is it now an outdated concern? Should I trust our client-base to be fully equipped for such a mailer? Should I worry about improper delivery marring our professional image? Is there anyone documenting the issue from a current-day perspective?"

Comments

In my inbox, most html mail gets dumped

[Mycroft_514]

before I even read it, so it if you want me to read it, send it plain text.

Re:In my inbox, most html mail gets dumped

[kawika]

My Bayesian spam filter, k9 has had only 4 false positives in six months. All of them were from HTML messages composed in Word. Seems that a lot of spammers don't know HTML and use Word to compose their spam as well.

Our company sends out a newsletter and I have (successfully) fought the same battle against HTML. Outlook 2003 doesn't even render external images anymore, so if it's a question of beauty just show your boss what that email looks like without its images.

Multi-part

[pbox]

Repeat after me:

M U L T I P A R T

Technology is your friend, even if you don't fell like making sense of rfc822. Send both in the same mail.

And don't buy the spam filter argument. While it is true that multipart messages get consistently higher spam scores, if your content is not spammy you are A-OK. If your content is spammy you got a problem on your hand regardless of the TEXT/HTML issue.

Yes

[crmartin]

I've got enough problems without worrying about weird-ass links and IE vulnerabilities. (Sadly, no, I can't avoid using MS products at work.)

And this is .. wrong tool!

[AndroidCat]

Why bulk email HTML newsletters? Send them a link to a page. You can have a number of different access controls on it if it's not supposed to be public, and get the advantage of logging page hits to see who's actually reading it.

Re:Unlikely

[toddbu]

I agree. We send virtually all email from our web site in HTML with the exception of invoice email. The reason that we send invoices in text is that we want to minimize the possibility of getting trapped by a spam filter. Start adding images and stuff like that and you'll get picked off.

My question for you is "what is your target audience?" If it's my mom then by all means send HTML email. If it's a bunch of geeks that hate HTML email then send them text. Actually, you can send both at the same time with a multipart MIME email. The problem here is that some email clients are kind of stupid and don't handle them well. For example, if you send text or multipart to Thunderbird and try to reply using an alternate identity then the message body is blank.

For what it's worth, one reason that HTML email is more widely accepted is that many clients turn off image rendering and javascript and other "bad" things by default. This leaves the remaining message pretty benign.

Use multipart/alternative

[dimss]

"multipart/alternative" is your friend.

Only spammers send HTML-only messages these days. In two years, I have received only one useful HTML-only message. BTW, rejecting HTML-only messages is a good way to reduce amount of incoming spam.

You can compose message in HTML and then use lynx to create text/plain part of message.

Re:Use multipart/alternative

[fm6]

Oh bullshit. Maybe everybody you know sends text only messages. Most users are non-geeks who don't even know how.

I used to work a help desk at an internet services company, where we had this brain-dead ticket system which was email based, and wasn't smart enough to filter dangerous attachments, so it would just display the raw MIME text. Yeah, I know, there are better ways, but I didn't design the software. My point is that I often had to eye-parse HTML message or find the pure-text part in multipart messages. How often did I have to do this? More than 90% of the time. And this was with a relatively tech-savy user base. Your "only spammers" assertion is pure crap.

Re:Email clients that still dont support it

[DShard]

Groupwise does indeed support html mail and has as long as I can remember. It is most likely the configuration of your client that is stopping support.

Re:Unlikely

[b00m3rang]

For what it's worth, one reason that HTML email is more widely accepted is that many clients turn off image rendering and javascript and other "bad" things by default. This leaves the remaining message pretty benign.

...and pretty UGLY. Text that doesn't line up, placeholder boxes for missing imges, pretty much something I'd delete immediately 100 times out of 100.

Re:Mutt users, unite!

[stevey]

Reading HTML Email with Mutt.

Using that technique I've never had a problem ..

Yes! yes yes yes yes yes!

[munpfazy]

>. . . but is it now an outdated concern?

No. There are plenty of reasons to avoid html email. Here's the one that may convince your boss: not everyone *can* read it, even today. At the very least, not everyone who is able to read it will be able to see the html formatting. One of the best things about plain text is that it forces you to format your message in a way that everyone will be able to read.

There are a lot of people who will never see your formatted html: businessmen and geeks using cellphones and PDA's, blind people with text readers, people whose spam filters decide that all html messages are spam, people who don't have computers and use stand-alone email terminals or webtv style appliances, people who use public terminals that have restrictive security settings, people using remote unix servers that lack recent text browsers, and people like me to go out of their way to avoid seeing inline html.

What's more, even if your email is readable and makes it through the spam filters, it will still make life difficult for many of your recipients. Mail sorting routines and client filters may choke or misfile your messages. Text searches will miss your messages. If you send your customers an invoice that can't be found in a search, you'll really piss them off.

Don't waste your time and money creating something that will reach *fewer* of your clients than plain old text.

> Should I trust our client-base to be fully equipped for such a mailer?

No. Most of the people in my office aren't, most by choice. While I'm capable of reading such a mailer, chances are I won't. Around 95% of the html email I receive gets instantly deleted without being read. If you aren't one of my personal friends and you send me html, you're wasting your bandwidth.

>Should I worry about improper delivery marring our professional image?

Yup. And not only improper delivery - even if your message gets through fine, sending people html is likely to annoy them. Sending html email is common to spammers,and amateur would-be-businesses. I've actively made a decision to avoid companies that refuse to send me plain text. (UpgradeSource comes to mind.)

Spam Debate

[Kalak]

Wondering if HTML will make your message look like spam? Well, I know I'd go here:
http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests_3_0_x.html and search on the html related tests and their scores.
They should tell you what the anti-spam community considers "evil".

I don't see a need for html mail - you want it to look a certain way, give me a blurb to get my interest and then link to the content. My friends do this with interesting links, newsletters I get are like this, I even view Slashdot on the "light" mode to get rid of as much of the clutter as possible. Then I go the the links to see more if I care to.

For AppleMail users

[bill_mcgonigle]

1. quit Mail
2. defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText 1
3. start Mail

then use cmd-} to cycle through Parts if you need HTML for some reason. Mostly HTML parts from companies consist solely of images to a graphics layout, complete with webbugs so it's rarely needed.

Re:Depends on who your recipients are

[crath]

Actually, it sounds just like RFC compliant email.

Re:Welcome to the real world

[DrSkwid]

Have you ever tried making HTML emails by hand ?

One of the troubles is, is that there is no One True Way to package one's MIME to have it rendered as HTML in a person's Email client.

is one supposed to even use MIME at all ?

Some clients, such as Outlook Express, will happily cope with just a
Content-Type: text/html in the headers though these days OE doesn't auto-download anything not attached such as images or ActiveX Controls !

Some people use nested multipart/alternative like so :

1 multipart/alternative
1.1 multpart/alternative
1.1.1 text/plain - 7bit encoding
1.1.2 text/html - 7bit encoding
1.2 cid:1 base64 encoded

and some send it

1 multipart/mixed
1.1 multipart/related
1.1.1 multipart/alternative
1.1.1.1 text/plain - quoted-printable
1.1.1.2 text/html - quoted-printable
1.1.2 cid:1 base64 encoded