I have some good arguments for plain text email. But, I love HTML email.
It's my personal belief that the sender should 'know' their recipients to some extent, though. Your reasons are good. Lets look at them (some overlap of course).... 1) Security. Everyone knows security is important. You should be able to close the deal on this alone. Though, at 2000+ emails a day for the last 4 years in my inbox, I haven't personally seen a single HTML email with malicious code. Indeed, not on any system I've been responsible for. But I have seen such code elsewhere and know it exists. I've probably inadvertantly written some myself. 2) Presentation. Your reasoning here sounds like personal preference. I can link a page in an HTML formatted email, too. Bring on the moving stationery (stationary stationery?)! I've sent out thousands upon thousands of HTML emails and not one person phoned me for clarification... and believe me, many of them made no sense! I find plain text emails more difficult to read usually. Why don't we just make all web pages plain text, too? 3) Compatability. Yes, there may be recipients whose email clients do not or can not render HTML. It is important to know, at least a little, your audience as it were. If I'm sending to someone (and I know people in the forest industry who use Pine as their email client. Ironic, eh?) who I know reads only plain text, I will select plain text as the format to send to that contact - configurable in Outlook of course. Because you are dealing with marketing, there may be email promos or mass mailings? In the case of a mass mailer where the recipients have opted-in (and there are no other kinds, right?), I like to offer the choice. "Would you like your newsletter in plain text or HTML?" Make the clients happy, rather than the vendors. Also... 4) Bandwidth. Is the recipient on dialup? Plain text might be better. Some people will argue a waste of bandwidth. This is often a sound argument as well. For me, since I pay for more bandwidth than I use, I'm really wasting it anyway... And the same argument could be made for the addition of irrelevant disclaimers appended to messages. *gasp* 5) WebBots or WebBugs. Or whatever you wish to call them. Embedded images that are called from a webserver remotely. These are not visible if the recipient downloads email for offline viewing or if they use an email client that does not allow such. This is the default for Outlook11 beta at the moment. No web-based content is displayed in email. Many email clients have this configurable option. 6) Message size. Similar to bandwidth, but lets look at it from a storage point of view. Both the sender and recipient will have a message of say... 50kb instead of 5kb. Over the longterm, there might be a savings in plain text storage. Imagine disclaimers in DHTML! EW! There are a few resources online listing reasons: http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml http://nohtmlemail.com/ http://www.betips.net/etc/evilmail.html It seems to me those that most dislike HTML email are messaging administrators. _ _ _____ __ __ _ _ _ | | | ||_ _|| \/ || | ___ _ __ ___ __ _ (_)| | | |_| | | | | |\/| || | / _ \| '_ ` _ \ / _` || || | | _ | | | | | | || |___ | __/| | | | | || (_| || || | |_| |_| |_| |_| |_||_____| \___||_| |_| |_| \__,_||_||_| _ _ _ __ ___ ___ | | __ ___ | | | '__| / _ \ / __|| |/ // __|| | | | | (_) || (__ | < \__ \|_| |_| \___/ \___||_|\_\|___/(_) (I briefly considered doing the entire email like the text immediately above, but a 101kb plain text email might have got someone's britches in a knot.) Plain text emails belong in a museum! Oops. Sorry... Mostly, I'm neutral though. Sorry I was of little help. :o) William -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Tim Gowen Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:35 AM To: Exchange Discussions I'm about to have to justify my personal belief that e-mail should be text-only and no HTML-based messages should go out from my Exchange 5.5 server. Unfortunately I'm up against a Marketing department who want to send the sort of message that I hate getting - one that downloads extra content from another site. My official reasons for opposing this, apart from my personal dislike of it, are: 1. Security: You can execute malicious code with HTML mail whereas plain text is simple 2. Presentation: It's better to link to a page so the user can click on the link and open their own browser. 3. Compatibility: People who receive these messages but not in the correct way will phone the people who sent them, who will phone me. This seems a little wooly to me, so I'd appreciate some good coherent arguments for text-only e-mail. Tim -- Tim Gowen RAF Museum IT Dept. Confidentiality: This e-mail and its attachments are intended for the above named only and may be confidential. If they have come to you in error you must take no action based on them, nor must you copy or show them to anyone; please reply to this e-mail and highlight the error. Security Warning: Please note that this e-mail has been created in the knowledge that Internet e-mail is not a 100% secure communications medium. We advise that you understand and observe this lack of security when e-mailing us. 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