Slashdot Mirror
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 but is it now an outdated concern?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?"
P.S. Suggestion: default to plain text because HTML is, in fact, evil.
Speak truth to power.
Hopefully your *Usenet boldface marks* were intentional :)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
If you are going to do it, make sure it looks OK without the images. My client gives me the option to load the images and, quite frankly, I never do.
In e-mail, I want the content, not fucking bling-bling.
If I wanted to SEE your product, I'd go you to your web site.
And shit like company banners and the like just piss me off to no end.
Finally, the tracker images. These, like read recipt, are of the devil. Read recipt is disabled in my client. My boss wants to know why I never read any of his e-mails. I tell him I do, but WHEN I read it is none of his fucking buisness.
Same for you. If I catch you tracking when I open an e-mail using something like http:\\server\images\myemailaddy\blank.gif, you'll be filtered. In fact, if I get any kind of weird feeling about the e-mail at all, you'll be filtered.
Make sure you understand that my client may be displayed in a preview frame. Don't expect me to open the item and maximixe it to read it. If it doesn't display properly in the frame, I won't scroll sideways to read it.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
You shouldn't really be worried about looking unprofessional, companies like Apple send out HTML emails.
There's a difference though, between text with HTML used to make it look a bit prettier, and text with HTML used to embed a load of images.
The first case is much more justifiable. You can make links properly, use bold and italics, etc.
The second is less justifiable. Unless you include the images as attachments, a significant portion of your readers will simply not see them - blocking external resources from being loaded is a basic anti-spam measure. Even including them as attachments isn't guaranteed to work, plus you'll piss more people off with the larger size.
There's also technology to think about. The rendering engine included in mail clients often works significantly differently compared with browsers - just try some CSS, for example, and you won't have (or want) a testing lab with all the different mailers available - they are far less homogenous than the browser market.
I agree with the people saying that you should offer a choice between plaintext and HTML. Also make it clear which type of HTML - plain or with images - that your newsletter is when you give them the choice. I'd pick plaintext over gaudy HTML, but plain HTML over plaintext.
One last thought: I'm unsubscribing from practically all the newsletters I can, and replacing them with Atom/RSS feeds where possible. It's simply a much more manageable way to deal with the information overload. By offering newsfeeds, you'll reach more people, and be friendlier to those that would put up with a newsletter grudgingly.
Send a plain text body and include a URL for the web version of the newsletter (and optional username+password). By keeping the body plain text and/or include a link to the web version, you increase accessibiliy for lowbandwidth users (modem, GPRS, etc.) and it works for all mail clients. An additional advantage of using the WWW for what it's good at is that you get some (vague) usage statistics.
If your message cannot be conveyed in plain text, then it's probably time to rethink the whole newsletter approach.
Plain text -- it was good enough for Shakespeare.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
You might want to check out my mutt config: http://www.sfu.ca/~kkisiel/mailconfig/. There's no HTML email I haven't been able to view thus far with these settings.
Agreed, multipart is definately a must.
.. I personally view my mail (thunderbird) with "original HTML", but "block images from remote sites" turned on. I get the ocasional mailer that is ONLY images from remote sites with no (or very little) text, and I can't see them at all. Their loss, as i usually just hit the delete button.
While it is true that multipart messages get consistently higher spam scores, if your content is not spammy you are A-OK
Well, the reason they get higher spam scores is because spam software usually adds points for being html. There's also a few additional checks specific to html -- ie, more points are added for having multiple different colors. I believe spam assassin also adds points for HTML-only.
Another thing to remember is how to use images
Speak before you think
Maybe everybody you know sends text only messages. Most users are non-geeks who don't even know how.
Don't users actually have to try pretty hard in order to send an html-only e-mail? For instance, in yahoo's mail, I believe the options you can select in the web interface are text-only and html+text; html-only isn't even an option. Is there some popular webmail service or GUI mail app that encourages the user to send html-only mail?
Find free books.
Newspapers neither cost more nor take longer to read the more images they contain.
Going to a movie theatre doesn't include a hidden bug at the start of the movie that confirms to some marketing droid that I'm a real person and they should feel free to spam my future visits with an extra 30 minutes of commercials before the movie starts.
And speaking as a former modem user who hasn't had broadband for that long, I promise you Slashdot is perfectly usable and just as informative/interesting with images disabled.
The grandparent was right on the money. E-mail is a text medium. If you can't tell me something through that medium, then chances are I don't want your e-mail. In fact, and this is a very good reason that businesses should not send HTML e-mails without an explicit request, your e-mail will get a huge negative score on my Bayesian anti-spam filter just for having it. That applies whether it's alone or combined with a separate text-only version, though if the text-only version matches the HTML content closely the penalty isn't so great. Moreover, even if it gets through the filter, it'll get rendered as plain text anyway, and therefore probably look worse than it would have done if you'd just sent me that in the first place. It's not exactly likely to improve your sales/feedback level/customer satisfaction/whatever on either count...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I do a weekly salesflyer email that reachs about 70000 people that are interested in DIY speaker building and pro sound(ie, technical but not necessarily computer-savy). about 99.9% of them choose to get the html version, even though about 10% of them have mailreaders that mangle it enough that they use the "Click here if everything is messed up" link I put at the top.
It's not terribly graphics heavy, the main reason is for layout & product pictures, plus the ease of having links instead of having to deal with "that url didn't work because my mailreader stuck a CRLF in the middle".
I love when spammers use Word. It reveals their real name and the name of their business, unless they lied when they installed MS Office, or used someone else's PC. I may even get information from the images they tried to include with the URL's still pointing to their C: drive.
I used K9 a lot too, back when I was using OE on Windows (now I'm on Linux). Though it's closed source, I felt inclined to donate $20 to him a couple years ago when it was getting updates every few weeks. It's unfortunate to see that now that it hasn't been updated in over a year it's still closed source. It was one of the best spam filters out there, when properly trained.
Now I have Thunderbird pretty well trained, but doing so was a pain. It involved about 20 cycles of doing "apply junk mail filters" to reclassify a large set of old emails and then correcting its mistakes, until it eventually got it all right.
My guess is that your boss wants to send HTML email for the presentation benefits - it can look COOL!
I filter out HTML email, so if I was one of your customers, I wouldn't ever see it. However, if you sent me a PDF file, with a covering message in plain email text, then I'd be much more likely to read the PDF. Furthermore, unlike HTML, PDF layout can be specified in such a way that it will appear ~identical on all systems.
I can tell you that several ISP's in Denmark have begun collective filtering for SPAM, one of the types of mails hit is HTML mail and as a user you're not even allowed to set your security level or what type of mail to let through so peoples mail get filtered w/o them knowing - I have had several mails to me disappear because of such measures - so I would definitely try to find an alternative in case this trend grows.
One option would be to send people a link to an optional download/read online page.
Hope you find the right solution.
- There is no accepted and implemented standard for word wrapping. There is "wrap at 72, quote to 80", which to few know how to get right to avoid comb quoting, and there is format: flowed, which too many clients don't implement correctly. HTML mail has no problems with word wrapping, as it is an essential part of HTML.
- Special character encoding. Umlauts and other 8-bit characters still don't display right in many combinations of MUAs and MTAs. HTML has character entities and charset declarations, not umpteen escape schemes.
- Alignment. Plaintext email users often align content with spaces. This doesn't work when the recipient uses a proportional font. HTML mails support proper content alignment without sacrificing the better readability of a proportional font.
- Structure. In HTML, different sized headers, lists and other markup allow much more user friendly structuring of the text.
It's really a shame that instead of working on defining an email-friendly subset of HTML, many users declare that plaintext email is the be all end all of email.The opposite. Send a text version, and have a link encouraging recipients to see the HTML version in all its glory, on a web page, where HTML is supposed to be used. Some nesletters I get do exactly this. For those who like HTML, it's only a click away, and is much more efficient all around. Your marketing guy can use Flash, play music or whatever crap takes their fancy. Also tell the PHB that it's less likely to be flagged as spam.