| I used to care about this, but these days it just seem pointless, and I just can't summon a slice of my limited energy for attention to care about this. I also find many of the reasons listed to be somewhat irrelevant: > HTML as a vector for phishing > Privacy invasion and tracking > Higher incidence of spam > Mail client vulnerabilities These are all potentially reasons to disable the display of HTML email in your own mail client, but they aren't a reason not to send HTML email. As a sender, I know I'm not trying to phish my recipient, or invade their privacy or track them, or spam them, or try to trigger a mail client vulnerability. So these just don't matter. From the recipient's point of view, many people receive HTML emails (that don't have an embedded plain-text alternative), and actually do need to read those emails. The kind of person who doesn't, likely already is a firm believer in plain-text-only and doesn't need to be convinced. And other reasons seem dubious: > HTML emails are less accessible This is odd, because HTML has accessibility features built into it. Certainly a bunch of plain text is easier for a screen reader to deal with, but only if the sender doesn't care about conveying formatting or nuance at all. Later in the piece, the author suggests using asterisks, underscores, etc. to indicate bold/italic/etc., but I expect screen readers don't know what that's supposed to mean, so using such a thing will make your emails less accessible, not more. > Some clients can't display HTML emails at all The kind of people who use mail clients that can't display HTML email at all are probably not in your target audience if you are going to send HTML email. If people like that have deliberately chosen to use software that can't display everything out there, that's their choice, and they can deal with the consequences. And anyway: > In a text-only interface it's not possible to render an HTML email, and instead the reader will just see a mess of raw HTML text. Then that's a missing feature in the terminal mail reader. If lynx and links can render HTML to a terminal in a useful, readable way, a mail reader can do so too. > A lot of people simply send HTML emails directly to spam for this reason. "A lot" is doing a bit of work there. I guess "a lot" of people in the author's small bubble? > Rich text isn't that great, anyway That's opinion, not fact, and reasonable people can reasonably disagree. I happen to be one of them. I actually don't use much in the way of text styling in my emails, but it's nice to have the option, and as someone who does sometimes receive actually-useful, non-spam HTML emails, the presentation/styling often does add to the experience, not detract. |
I've seen a lot of email providers flag random emails for having weird HTML. why take the chance of non-delivery at all? send plain text.