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 but is it now an outdated concern?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?"
I doubt that it will cause a professionalism problem. Anyone who cannot read HTML emails know that they exist and that they can't read them and will therefore, not think of your company as being non-professional. It is a good idea to allow the recipient to choose whether he wants HTML formatted news or plain-text, but the current position is not as bad as it may seem.
I don't mind HTML email, personally, but when I have a choice, I opt for the plain-text version. I think that's the key--allow people to receive your newsletters, receipts, or whatever in the format they want, and things should be fine.
I'd also default to HTML mailings, simply because the people who bitch loudest about HTML (non-pejorative) are also probably capable of finding the preference for plaintext themselves.
Yes.
Hundreds of thousands of email content publishers ask their users whether they want plain-text or HTML versions. Even if most users don't understand the question, they're used to being asked. Why don't you try that and then just publish one version of your newsletter to each of the resulting lists?
99% of business email is HTML. Nobody cares about the "evil" of HTML mail except a few crusty old geeks. Last I checked, even Mozilla defaults to sending HTML mail.
Keep in mind that business people come from the tradition of using propriety mailers like Lotus ccMail, Lotus Notes, and MSMail, and saw no reason to remove functionality when switching to Internet mail. These people just don't care about the archaic 7-bit Internet olden days. (And, yes, HTML in mail was a design mistake, but as of yet it's the only way to get colored fonts and pictures in your mail, so that's what's used.)
Just make sure include a text/plain part, so if your recpients want to drop the HTML, they have that option.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
before I even read it, so it if you want me to read it, send it plain text.
It'd be interesting to see some form of bbcode for email. It'd do what most people would need it to do and I don't really think one can do a lot of damage with bbcode. Except emotional damage with the [img] tag, but nobody cares about that.
If you're targetting savvy developers (ie, me), then they probably wont read your crappy html mail (and I'd probably unsubscribe even if it were text, but that's really a different issue). But if you were targetting my mom, she'd probably not notice or care. In fact, she might like the html version with its pretty pictures or whatever.
The best way is to send both a text part and an HTML part and let the client decide how they want to see it. I made sure my client automatically shows me the text part if there are both.
-David
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
P.S. Suggestion: default to plain text because HTML is, in fact, evil.
Speak truth to power.
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.
I hate them, and I'll never use an e-mailclient which handles them by any other way than allowing me (if I want to) to view them with Lynx.
Using HTML in e-mails isn't exactly evil, but not including a text/plain-part containing the same information is IMNSHO so...
perl -e'print$_{$_} for sort%_=`lynx -dump svanstrom.com/t`'
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.
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
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.)
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.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
"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.
The right way to do ethics is to forget stupid dogmas like "HTML email is evil" and base your decisions how your actions affect other people. Like a lot of other technologies, HTML email can be misused; specifically, senders can breach security with script-based malware, and privacy with graphic-based tracking cookies. If you don't engage in these abuses yourself, where's the ethical issue?
If you're concerned about security of your own users, you might tell them, "don't accept HTML email". But even that's serious overkill -- Thunderbird is perfectly capable of blocking security and privacy penetration while still accepting HTML email. Outlook is less impressive that way, but Microsoft software is hardly the gold standard for security.
"HTML email is evil" is standard geek bigotry. We're able to get by with pure-text message, anybody who can't is an asshole. Its time to remember that the whole world doesn't revolve around us.
Yeah, you heard him! Mutt users unite! All three of you!
zosxavius photography
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.
Four! I'm in the club, too!
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
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.
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.
Reading HTML Email with Mutt.
Using that technique I've never had a problem ..
I get email and news alerts on my pager and phone, html versions are a pain in the ass.
;)
HTML does not belong in emails, unless its porn.
Even though I default to text e-mail and turn off previews in my mail client, I also accept that HTML e-mail has pretty much become the default.
I would suggest that your best option is to offer a choice of text or HTML, or if that seems unwieldy, to poll your client base for their preferences. If most of them want HTML, then that's what you should deliver to them
Asking them first is a good move. It makes them feel that you care about their needs, and in the event that you do go with a regular HTML format it will reassure them that you are not sending something malicious.
As is so often the case, this is a question of communication and marketing, not technology. Your choice, and how you implement it, should be determined by the needs or preferences of your clients, not by geekish outrage.
Personally I prefer either a URL back to your site or to a PDF.
Three Squirrels
>. . . 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.)
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.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
That says it all. You can present your ideas for consideration, if you work for the type who's willing to accept the input without marking you as a rebelious sot who need to be taught a lesson. But after the discussion, either take the check and do the work or find another job. If you aren't willing to shut up and carry on with the company plan, you can be replaced by one of several Microsoft programs.
Not that I'm trying to slam you, I read html mail as text on my personal e-mail. But html mail at work is a requirement, and a one of the lesser standards that I'm willing whore out for a cut of the pie. If you can present your reasons in a calm business case style Powerpoint brain dump void of combativeness, you've got a better shot than shouting "HTML IS EVIL" to the PHB who probably just want pretty picture to go to customer.
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".
Google does html mail. Google doesn't do evil. Therefore html mail is not evil.
I'm sure the marketing morons at my employer think the same. However, they'd probably think it less if they realised that the standard masthead they attach to all our "from the CEO" reports displayed slightly differently in several common mail clients that don't start with the letters "MS O", with unfortunate consequences for the caption under his photograph.
(In case anyone's wondering, a couple of letters basically get clipped because the layout in Gecko-based rendering isn't quite the same, and those missing letters leave rather entertaining -- unless you're the CEO, I suppose -- alternative wording...)
That's funny; I send e-mails in plain text format all the time, and don't seem to miss them. If you can't do it with a :-) or possibly a little *obvious emphasis* then it's probably not worth doing in an e-mail anyway.
Of course, the fact that you even mentioned underlining and italics demonstrates one of the biggest problems with HTML e-mail immediately: most people go for the whizzy effects, without a clue as to the reduction in readability they're creating.
Hint #1: Underlining is almost always a design error. It obscures descenders and draws the eye away from the text, breaking reading flow. Moreover, in HTML-style documents, it commonly denotes hyperlinks, and using it in other contexts is likely to confuse readers.
Hint #2: Italics should be used cautiously when viewing on a screen is expected. If your message is likely to be read by people with poorly-configured or low-resolution screens, the italics will look terrible. For example, I use them on Slashdot where I expect pretty much everyone reading my posts to have a decent video set-up, but I use alternatives on a few other boards where this might not be the case.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Rule number one: you are not your user.
Don't ask us geeks. Ask normal people.
Nielsen Norman Group publishes two sets of guidelines for email usability.
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/newsletters/
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/confirmation/
* Choice is best.
* If it looks broken, they'll notice and hate it.
* The first few lines and the subject/sender have to make the case for reading it at all in the age of spam.
These reports cost money but they are still much cheaper than losing customers.
the html coded email is 1/2 of it, and the plain text version saying the same exact thing is the other 1/2 of the email. Thus, you essentially triple the size of each email, if you include all the html tags.
Additionally, even simple graphics will bloat this monstrously when they are encoded into the email. And more than likely the Boss wants an html newsletter because he wants to work some graphics magic.
I have a modest suggestion for Charlie: do up a sample email newsletter with very simple graphics (like maybe the company logo and perhaps one other line drawing), send it to yourself, then print the message source. When you and your boss can see exactly what happens when images are encoded for emailing, then the two of you can come up with a reasonable approach.
But by all means, consider letting your customers choose a plaintext version if they want to keep their inbox trim and svelte.
Putting the html version on the web with a link from a plaintext version is probably a good option for a lot of businesses.
Personally I just delete most of those e-mails - if they can't bother with a nice/friendly e-mail to me I'll take my business elsewhere.
perl -e'print$_{$_} for sort%_=`lynx -dump svanstrom.com/t`'
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.
HTML is NOT the universal data format over HTTP. By far the most data transfered over HTTP is MIME encoded binary data or one kind or another (mostly gifs, jpgs, mp3s etc.
In case you hadn't noticed HTML is a subset of text. In case you hadn't noticed ASCII is a piece of crap that should have died years ago - or are you suggesting that it's innapropriate for Japanese people to communicate via SMTP email?
It's perfectly fine to use SMTP to send Unicode text data. Why is it not fine to use SMPT to send HTML text data? Why would it be a feature to prevent an email message having embedded images? Do you think it's bad the way some word processors can embed spreadsheets? Do you think we should force the separation into different applications "where they belong"?
Do you think its bad that email clients support hyperlinking from plain text emails, on the grounds that hyperlinking belongs to the web, and hey, this is _email_? That would be dumb, right?
Do you also object to web based email clients, on the grounds that hey - this is the web - cut out the email!?
The sooner geeks get over the fact that technology moves on the better.
Marketing emails (whether spam or legit) are always _much_ more effective if they are HTML. Maybe not with you, but you aren't important. If you want the world at large to get a message, sending it in a (well designed) HTML email *is* more effective. It's that simple. Deal with it.
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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.