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 but is it now an outdated concern?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.

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: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.

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.