Are you morally opposed to HTML emails?

Are you morally opposed to HTML emails?

  • Yes - HTML emails should not be used at all

  • No - HTML emails are fine in at least some cases

Results are only viewable after voting.
MDLarson

MDLarson

Registered
Occasionally, my company sends out a promotional email in HTML format to our customer database (we've sent a grand total of 1 so far, and I'm working on the 2nd). In my research on the subject, I've come across more than a few folks who have put up their personal testimonies condemning the use of HTML emails based on...
Privacy (embedded images used for tracking the recipient)
Bandwidth (plain text emails are much smaller)
Bad taste (complaints about ugly emails)

Anyway, I get the feeling that some people consider themselves on morally higher ground for eschewing HTML emails. I consider them to be useful in cases like I've described above with my own company, and just another medium for communications.

Just want to gather your thoughts. :)
 
I agree completley with HTML based email on a few conditions. That 1) the email is built properly and tested in a range of browsers and email clients. Man I wish email clients would support css. And 2) That your audience is a database of users that have volunteered thier email.
 
As a net geezer I would like to point out that the bad rap HTML email has was well earned. I don't mind it now but I do have all the nasty bits turned off (like no remote images) back in the day it was a real pain. Especially when you think that there were whole universities sharing less bandwidth that I have in my living room now. I remember waiting for huge 16k gif files to load in NSCA Mosaic and the young whippersnappers of today just don't appreciate what we went through!

Seriously, though those arguments are old for the most part. There are some significant problems with HTML email that still have some currency though. An easy one is that it is fragile even using modern email clients. Just this past month my wife forwarded me a message from Orbitz from her Windows XP box running Outlook to me on my Mac running Mail.app and it was screwed up. I ended up reading through the raw HTML to find the flight info I needed and I still have no idea what part of the system was messed up. I just accept that HTML mail gets broken more often that not.

Also keep in mind that because the correlation between spam and html mail is so high may people will not see your message. Again back in the old days when life was easier on the spam front I used procmail to filter it out and two rules would block 95% of spam: block HTML and block anything that had traveled through a Korean server.

A big part of the reason flagging HTML as junk is effective is that culturally, nice people don't send HTML email. What year is it (counts on fingers) ? Until I got my Mac 3 years ago I did not even use an email program capable of correctly displaying HTML email. Think about it for the first 80% of my life online HTML email was not an option for me and to this day it is still not an option for many of my colleagues. Sending a message to someone who may not be able to understand it is really quite arrogant on the part of the sender and is not well received by the community at large. It will take a while for the bad blood there to go away as this was a serious issue at one time and we are not just being silly little luddites.

-Eric
 
99,99 % i don't like html emails.

and 100 % i hate emails with "funny" unrequested powerpoint presentations.

unluckily, it is not possible to make a filter in mail "if email contains" "<html>" or ".pps" > "move to trash".
 
lurk - I don't think you're being luddites - I don't read html emails unless there is some very pressing reason. The opposition for me is not moral, but, I guess, aesthetic. I almost never see an html email message that isn't so annoyingly laid out that the presentation gets in the way of the message. That's even the case for very simple html generated by Outlook - that always seems to make the fonts much too tiny, or (worse) put a background image in the message, but that's a bit less annoying, since there will be a plaintext alternative.

If you can't write me something in plain text, it's like if you can't say it to me in a quiet speaking voice - I assume it's probably junk, and don't listen.

Gia - actually, Mail.app probably does trash pure html mails for you, if there is no plain text alternative - that's still to this day a very good indication a message is spam, and probably by now has a strong association with spam in the 'intelligent' spam filters.

Do you remember a while back, when hotmail suddenly switched to pure html messages without a plain text alternative? All of a sudden, lots of people didn't receive messages from hotmail users, because spam filters trashed them on sight. I don't know if microsoft went back to offering plain text alternatives, or if the spam filter maintainers changed their rules...
 
Hmm, yeah I think I understand ya'll's point-of-view. Admitedly, I should be doing a better job of testing my HTML email in more email clients, and make them more friendly in general. And honestly, the email I send out for my company will probably be considered spam by maybe 10% of the recipients. Personally I am fine with receiving advertising from those companies who are clearly legitimate, don't use tricks to get past spam filters or to get you to open the email, and offer an "unsubscribe" link that works (all of which our company is OK with).

Divorcing the topic from the association with SPAM, how do you guys feel? I mean, as a raw technology, it's certainly more flexible (better?) to be able to add pictures or emphasize text in an email.

I can definately see problems with different clients not recognizing the emails properly though.
 
I got a really great program called LittleSnitch... Whenever a program tries to make an Internet connection, it asks if that is okay.

Ever since I've installed that I've become a LOT less opposed to HTML email. I used to have this feature disabled in Entourage, but have since re-enabled it. I simple tell LittleSnitch to no download anything that is clearly spam/porn.

With this setup I actually am enjoying email more... including HTML emails.
 
MDLarson said:
...more than a few folks who have put up their personal testimonies condemning the use of HTML emails based on...
Privacy (embedded images used for tracking the recipient)...
Click to expand...
This was always my biggest concerns... Especially "Web bugs" that don't actually display images, but nontheless pass data back to the server.

The classic example of this is an image link that pulls in a blank image, but passes "blank.gif?emailvalid=(your-eamil-address.com)" along the URL... Terrible!!!

In this way HTML is Spammers delight because it is a quick/easy/nearly invisible way of determining which eamil addresses are valid.

This is why I prefere big/fat bloated emails that have all of the images attached vs. emails that retreive the images from some internet server.
 
lurk said:
...I remember waiting for huge 16k gif files to load in NSCA Mosaic and the young whippersnappers of today just don't appreciate what we went through!
Click to expand...
I remeber... I remember... I used the v0.9 beta of Netscape and it rocked compared to Mosaic.

But thier is no way in H#ll that you're taking me back! You'll have to pry my DSL connection from my cold-dead-hands!

::evil::
 
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