David Emery Online

How to send the perfect HTML e-mail

7 May 2009

Why? Well, an e-mail is not a webpage. A webpage is on the web. It’s viewed by a web browser. An e-mail gets displayed in a mail user agent (MUA). E-mails get indexed by software that is calibrated for coping with text/plain. The point of HTML is that it’s a representation format for hypertext documents. I have yet to see an e-mail that wouldn’t be better as text/plain. And, yes, other people disagree. I don’t particularly give a shit. E-mail means text/plain.

I used to agree with the whole ‘html emails are evil‘ schtick until I realised that there’s actually no good reasoning to back up that viewpoint whatsoever (it was – of course – at the point where I had to justify my ‘emails we send have to be in plain text’ in a work related context).

Other then the faintly religious ‘html email is bad cos we say so’ argument, what exactly is wrong with it?

We wouldn’t argue that web pages should be plain text, would we? I fail to see how this is different considering the proliferation of html supporting email clients, and surely no-one is really arguing that we shouldn’t be able to use such basic things as headings, bold and italics? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of bad html email out there but that doesn’t mean the medium itself is bad.