HTML Email: The Poll
Reader Kiernan recently contacted me about my old (and apparently much-linked-to) Why HTML in E-Mail A Bad Idea document, saying:
I do not believe HTML email is going to disappear any time now. In fact, I expect we will see an increase in HTML email which suggests we need guidelines, not proscription. I think in the interests of furthering discussion on this subject, a poll would be useful.
Personally, I care a lot less about this subject than I used to. I’m still no fan of HTML email, but it doesn’t bug me the way it once did. Formatting in email can be useful and attractive. The security concerns it raises aren’t very relevant to me since I use a Mac (though I’m still concerned for all the Outlook users out there). Even command-line pine displays the plain-text alternate properly for most HTML emails these days.
At its best, HTML email highlights the strong points in a message. At its worst (for me), HTML email is a minor annoyance, sometimes resulting in tiny font displays — but nothing I can’t get around by punching Cmd-+ on the keyboard. There are a thousand things under heaven and earth more worthy of getting het up about. What about you? Have your feelings about HTML-formatted email changed over the years?
January 15th, 2006 at 2:08 am
One thing you may want to add to that page is that Spamassassin tests for “spaminess” based on HTML content. If you want to avoid your mail being flagged as a false positive, send plain text.
And there’s a reason SA tests for that. HTML in e-mail is a bad idea. There is no truly compelling reason why HTML needs to be in e-mail, and yet there are a multitude of reasons why it’s bad.
January 15th, 2006 at 7:42 am
Good point about SA weightings — just added that. But SA doesn’t test for HTML because HTML email is a bad idea - it tests for it because it’s a red flag that a message is an attention-grabbing advertisement, i.e. spam.
But I should add that even though SA weights HTML messages differently, I’ve personally never seen a legit message with straightforward HTML formatting actually flagged as spam. Its ranking might go up a but, but not enough to trigger any rules or filters, unless someone has reconfigured the HTML weighting up from the SA defaults.
There is no truly compelling reason why HTML needs to be in e-mail, and yet there are a multitude of reasons why it’s bad.
One could argue (OK, I’m arguing) that I’ve come to accept that formatting in email is every bit as compelling as formatting on a web page or in a word processor. And meanwhile, some of its downsides have been diminished over the years. A much wider array of clients handle HTML email consistently, legibly, and safely. There are still lots of reasons not to use it, but I just don’t think it’s the big deal it used to be.
January 15th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
My big annoyance with HTML email is privacy concerns, especially with 1×1 images called webbugs that are individually targeted at people to see if they have opened (and how many times they have opened) an email message.
January 16th, 2006 at 1:04 am
@Joe: Web bugs are avoidable in most (good) email clients, which these days usually have an option to turn off the loading of images. I know Eudora, Apple Mail, and even Outlook (current version) have this option. Heck, even Gmail does this!
Anyway, if you haven’t done so, be sure to turn off loading of images to avoid the web bugs.
January 16th, 2006 at 1:59 am
I’ll give you one specific reason why html email is a good idea: Because subscribers to a visual arts newsletter welcome it as a content-rich preview of website content. Obviously a newsletter announcement describing a work of art e.g. without an accompanying image is less effective communication.
This is of course a very specific non-spam example.
I believe that the manner in which the poll question is not objective and by its nature seeks to affirm a majority negative opinion. HTML was not widely in use in 2000. I maintain that the appearance of html email would have met with opposition by the majority as all change is initially met with resistance. Phrasing the question “has your opinion changed” implies for the majority in this case “has your negative opinion changed”.
HTML email is primarily used to advertise. What is the opinion regarding the use of HTML email for promotional purposes?
January 16th, 2006 at 3:46 am
Publishing has a long history of WSYIWYG design dating back to early printing presses and the history of typefaces. That desire to control presentation is not going to go away anytime soon and, if anything, it’s only going to evolve more. Like many things related to publishing, publishing HTML mail really comes down to audience, context and personal preferences and peeves.
Debating it reminds of me of early debates on the web as being something users can flexibly control presentation of vs. WYSIWYG web design. Surely the Web has shown us some lessons as it evolved from user controlled formatting preferences to format centric designs.
There are valid and not so valid reasons to want to control the way something you post on a web page or send in email is formatted. And there are reasonable arguments why this is bad and causes material not to be displayed the same for everyone else and causes accessibility issues.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ absolute right or wrong. It’s all about context, individual desires and intent on both ends of any broadcast, and finding best solution for your audience when you publish anything — even an email to mom.
For personal and professional communication I think it boils down to knowing your audience and designing for them. Not using HTML is certainly a design choice too, and a limiting one for many professional or personal email communications.
The bottom line is that people tend to want to design for their audience and will. And there are times that this is not appropriate. A large percentage of the people designing web pages or sending HTML email are not going to have a clue that it matters to a small percentage of people out there and won’t care anyway. Authors will chose based on audience or personal preference and will miss some of their audience as a result.
Millions of users on AOL and in Outlook/Outlook Express probably have no idea what HMTL email is since it’s transparent to them. Being a critical purist won’t change this.
Personally, I waffle between indifference and liking it more now. I use both, depending on context of whether I have a reason to choose one or the other, and thinking about it little if I don’t have any reason to care whether it’s formatted or not.
If your mom has the ability to see pictures in email as embedded images she’s probably more likely to see and enjoy the pictures if you send them in a formatted email than if you send tham as attachments. But if you’re mailing someone who you know uses pine or has dialup service then sending a 2 meg email with embedded photos is useless.
There’s times I want to be able to send inline images instead of as atatchments, or formatting that’s difficult to get across in ASCII such as lists, tables with cells, color formatting to differentiate text.
And I sure find color coded text in quoted replies a lot easier to read for context to follow two or more voices than any other means of marking quotes. It still amazes me how many ways people can find to quote text in replies and not make it obvious where they added text threaded into my own words sent back to me.
Good communication is an art form, and bad communicators will continue to misuse presentation formatting. Sleazeballs will find new ways for SPAM to slip by or to abuse security loopholes.
HTML isn’t inherently evil. It has just been exploited historically. Web browsing has exposed people to security issues too but you don’t see may people arguing about not using scripts in web pages. Spam will increase exponentially once your email address is circulated whether tracking images tell anyone you’re looking at it or not.
January 16th, 2006 at 4:44 am
Kiernan,
If you just put a URL in the body of a text message with “Click here to read our most recent newsletter,” not only would it accomplish the exact same goal, but it would also decrease the bandwidth used to send and receive your mail.
January 16th, 2006 at 10:58 am
I too used to rail against the evils of HTML email, back in the good old days…. :)
But now I don’t really notice it. For me the line between email inbox and browser window is completely blurred, almost to the point of forgetting about it.
I get email and RSS feeds in the same client (Thunderbird). When I view my RSS inbox, I see a bunch of HTML pages rendered inline via a Gecko renderer embedded in T-Bird. Ditto for when I read HTML email. Some messages are formatted more nicely than others, just as some RSS feed grabs are nicer than others. But at the end of the day, the distinction between the two classes of messages is growing more and more arcane for me.
Regarding the issue of privacy violation, however, I totally agree. I don’t like the idea of HTML image bugs tracking the fact that I’ve seen a message in my inbox. But the reality here is that my spam filter is so well trained in T-Bird that I’m very rarely ever rendering spam messages which use this technique. And the few whitelisted sources which do this don’t concern me because I by-and-large approve of their business.
January 16th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
I believe that the manner in which the poll question is not objective and by its nature seeks to affirm a majority negative opinion. HTML was not widely in use in 2000.
Kiernan - I cannot of course lay claim to any kind of scientific objectivity with informal polls on a weblog frequented by techies and Mac-heads. As for assuming a negative opinion, I’d say that’s true - I and many readers of this site have long been sworn enemies of HTML email (although as you can see my feelings have changed in recent years). From my PoV, we’re talking about something that has been regarded by most techies as a much-hated technology. So, yes, I do assume that most readers here start (or started) with a negative view - the poll only asks whether feelings have changed recently.
No, HTML email was not in as wide use in 2000 as it is today, and that’s just it - what used to be seen as Microsoft foisting a dangerous and inconvenient system on the Internet is now seen as just part of daily life, and as a cross-platform issue.
HTML email is primarily used to advertise. What is the opinion regarding the use of HTML email for promotional purposes?
There is a distinction to be made there, and I think it’s also useful to distinguish between simple bold/italic formatting of text messages vs. sending entire, designed web pages as emails. Both are ultimately HTML, but the latter has more potential for danger.
Mal: If your mom has the ability to see pictures in email as embedded images she’s probably more likely to see and enjoy the pictures if you send them in a formatted email than if you send tham as attachments.
The distinctions are further blurred by the fact that even plain text emails often look to the untrained eye like formatted messages. The receiving client renders links as clickable, quotes previous discussion in multiple colors, and often renders image attachments in-line. It’s made it tricky to explain things to general users who ask questions like “How can I make my images appear in the message body?” and “How can I send a clickable link.” It’s all gotten very blurry.
January 16th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
Just out of curiosity, I decided to send two messages to myself, one with and one without bold and colored text, otherwise identical. Here are their SpamAssassin rankings:
Without formatting:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.4 required=3.5 tests=ALL_TRUSTED
With formatting:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.4 required=3.5 tests=ALL_TRUSTED,HTML_MESSAGE
So SA did pick up that it was HTML, but didn’t even give it enough of a nudge to raise its ranking 1/10 of a point. That’s with SA’s default weighting configuration, which is indicative of how the open source developers see the likelihood of simple HTML formatting reflecting a message’s spamminess.
I then dug up a fully HTML-enabled “web page in your email” style message from Allumne Systems and checked its SA header info:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.1 required=3.5 tests=HTML_MESSAGE, HTML_TAG_EXIST_TBODY
So in this case, the message received two distinct HTML-related flags rather than one, and its score changed accordingly. But still not enough to exceed even my (quite strict) 3.5 SA threshold.
January 17th, 2006 at 2:52 am
I don’t like the security impact of rendering HTML mail; even lynx has had serious security bugs in the past and when invoked from a mailer (after, say, dumping the message to some temporary file) there are different things to worry about than when browsing online.
I’m a big fan of the Web, but not of crowbarring the markup from it into niches where it doesn’t add much, and potentially costs plenty.
It also aids phishing, as making a plain-text link point somewhere strange is quite hard, but confusing folk with full-on markup is a lot easier.
January 17th, 2006 at 3:09 am
Ok so we have a poll on HTML email as an outcome of an article called “Why HTML in E-Mail A Bad Idea” - I have to say that on the face of it this poll is biased. Where is the fair and balanced approach? Fox News should be doing this.
IMHO I think you guys are format weenies. The medium is not the message. Just write the damn mail and save your anger for where it counts.
January 17th, 2006 at 8:42 am
Hey Lee - I’ve already addressed the bias thing above. The poll is not trying to guage whether formatted email is good or bad, but whether there’s a sea-change in opinion about it from five years ago, when I first wrote the article. Given that goal, and given that I know that most readers here have historically hated HTML email, I’m not sure how else I could have phrased the questions in the poll to make it appear unbiased.
And I’ve never run a poll here that pretended to scientific objectivity. They’re just informal temperature guages, nothing more.
January 17th, 2006 at 11:52 am
I’m just having a bit of fun (which is lessened by having to explain it). The whole notion that you guys actually take *the underlying display formatting* of electronic notes very seriously is a source of great amusement to me. (3 million people are at risk for freezing to death in pakistan this winter for chrissake…) Too bad there’s no emoticons for dripping sarcasm or deadpan irony.
;-)
January 17th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
Sorry Lee! You know, I actually did detect a hint of sarcasm in your first comment, but wasn’t quite sure, so decided to answer it seriously. That’ll teach me.
January 17th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Lee,
Maybe you could send an HTML e-mail letting everyone know the desperate plight of Pakistanis. Be sure to include lots of embedded pictures and sounds and fancy text formatting and tons of font tags and web bugs and disguised links to aid websites that actually redirect to Russian phishers.
:P
January 18th, 2006 at 4:04 am
Not sure quite how to answer this one - Scot, I’m sure we had some sort of disagreement around four years ago, you saying that HTML in email was evil in any circumstances, me saying that HTML in email was mainly evil but that it had its uses. I still feel the same, although a part of me seems to feel a little better about HTML in email nowadays, so that’s the option I chose.
What really annoys me is that so much email software defaults to HTML. I get very frustrated receiving one-line emails, and thinking about how much extra overhead the HTML adds to that email. But I can live with it. Personally, I send 95% of my emails as text, but if I want, say, a bulleted list then I will send the email to HTML. I’m also more likely to send HTML emails to friends of mine who I know would appreciate me using genuine italics rather than _text equivalents_
And I almost always subscribe to newsletters in HTML. There is a world of difference between an HTML newsletter (which I will often read, or at least look at) and an email which says “click this URL to read our latest newsletter”, which 90% of the time I’ll delete automatically.
January 18th, 2006 at 10:49 am
So Dan, this is basically me catching up to where you were on this a few years ago :)
January 19th, 2006 at 5:17 am
Haha, yes, I was the future!
May 5th, 2006 at 1:04 am
I’ve read these types of comments in various forums. Typically (IMO) the people advocating “HTML E-mail is EVIL” are developers/technical people. I manage the email communication for a large retail business, and I can tell you one thing for sure… users prefer emails with pretty pictures. It’s that simple. For the very same reason you won’t read a plain text print magazine, most users hate reading plain text emails. So while techies are debating amongst themselves over it’s evils, try asking non-tech users for their opinion.
July 15th, 2006 at 9:33 am
One thing people complaining about HTML in posts seem to have forgotten is that not everyone sends emails in English.
If you email in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic or any number of other languages, the 7 bit ASCII just won’t cut it. It is neccessary to use Unicode. This means a document format is neccessary to send Unicode through a 7 bit mail format. There is RTF, but it isn’t very simple and is proprietary of Microsoft. HTML is the one that gets chosen as it is the best known format for doing this.
September 25th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
As of 2006-09-25, almost 50% of the responses indicate that they do not like receiving HTML in email. That should be enough to discourage its use.
If you use HTML in email, then on average, you will be pissing off half of the people you email (assuming that you email a broad section of the population who responded to this poll).
September 25th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Ken, keep in mind that readers of this site are skewed heavily toward the geek side. “Normal” users tend not to have nearly as much of a problem with HTML email, and are much more likely to actually prefer it.
October 11th, 2006 at 12:19 am
I’ve read a few legtimate reasons for preferring plain text (e.g. mail size). Many others seem a little… spurious.
One possible explanation is that proponents of plain text were trying to objectively justify a viewpoint that has at its heart an unspoken, subjective aspect.
The whole “HTML vs. plain ASCII” debate was surely as much about defining “us” against “them”, the “cognoscenti” vs. the “ignorant masses”, the “geek “vs. the “non-geek” as any security/bandwidth/ whatever reasons.
See also Shacker’s Sept 25th comment above plus comments to the effect of “there are more important things to worry about”…
Have a nice day, now.
October 11th, 2006 at 2:05 am
PS - to be fair to geeks, all social groups engage in “boundary-defining” behaviours (e.g. political parties, organised religions, etc.) Anthropologists and pyschologists might well identify this email debate as just another method that a particular social group (i.e. geeks) uses to partition the world into “us” and “them”.
PPS - apologies for capitalising “Shacker” above…
January 25th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Hi how do I send an entire page in html using email in PHP, can do it in ASP but not PHP.
Any help would be great!
Cheers
West
January 25th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
West, there are many ways to do it, but I use the PHPMailer class.
March 13th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Hi there
I used to be disliking HTML in emails, too, but that changed over the years. Currently, I think it is OK to add some personal style to emails as long as the HTML produced is readable by all email clients out there.
In fact, I use HTML in emails myself. But I use Thunderbird and my settings make sure each email is sent as both HTML and plain text. This way everybody will be able to read the email regardless the client.
Speaking of bandwidth: What is an email blown to 3kb instead of 1kb going to really change in bandwidth usage compared to the tons of SPAM emails each day, video streamings all over the place and the like the internet has to handle.
I don’t really get the point in saving those extra 2kb needed for HTML. And additionally, emails are text and as such can be, and most of the time are, compressed when transmitted.
Chris
March 13th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Here is the way I got it to work: LINK or PAGE
Just the link:
//$html = "Put your html in this variable";
$html = "http://www.domain.com/index.php";
$email = "email@domain.com"; // who it is to
$subject = "Subject";
$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
$headers .= "From: Name \r\n";
mail($email,$subject,$html,$headers);
Send an entire page:
$page = "http://www.domain.com/page.html";
$buffer = "";
$handle = fopen($page, "r");
if ($handle) {
while (!feof($handle)) {
$buffer .= fgets($handle, 4096);
}
fclose($handle);
}
require('class.phpmailer.php');
$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->IsSMTP();
$mail->Host = 'localhost';
$mail->From = 'mail@domain.com';
$mail->FromName = 'Name';
$mail->AddBCC ('mail@domain.com', 'Name');
$mail->AddReplyTo('mail@domain.com', 'Name'); // optional name
$mail->WordWrap = 50; // set word wrap to 50 characters
//$mail->AddAttachment('image.jpg','Name'); // optional name
$mail->IsHTML(true); // set email format to HTML
$mail->Subject = 'HTML Test';
$mail->Body = $buffer;
//$mail->AltBody = ''; //this is for text no HTML
if(!$mail->Send())
{
echo 'Message could not be sent. ';
echo 'Mailer Error: ' . $mail->ErrorInfo;
exit;
}
echo 'Message has been sent';
Cheers
West
March 13th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Hi Sorry,
Forgot to add that you need phpmailer class for this file
class.phpmailer.php
Cheers
West
April 12th, 2007 at 4:16 am
I still have no preference as I can emphasize and highlight in any format, Plain, Rich Text or HTML. The biggest issues I have relate to how so many people put elaborate content into their messages that don’t translate well from one format to the other and end up with dozens of attachments (at best).
One of the biggest beef’s I have is when someone embeds an OLE Object into an Outlook message that neither translates to another format nor does it properly show up as an attachment. They then reference the embedded message as “key” information and you have to request they send the original document just so you can understand what they’re referring to.
While this may be a handy way to quickly communicate on an excerpt from a project’s workbook or presentation, it doesn’t bode well for multi-platform email readers.
After all, 99% of the universe uses Outlook don’t they? [rhetorical]
Don’t get me started on my soapbox - I used to be a messaging specialist in the mid-to-late 90’s (Unix/Banyan mostly) and learned volumes about the intricacies of Microsoft messaging. You know you have problems when your OS platform still refers to LANMan and messaging is still based on the MMF architecture.
June 8th, 2007 at 6:34 am
If you want to send me email and make any kind of positive contact, send text. HTML emails are highly offensive.
July 1st, 2007 at 4:04 am
The issue of HTML formatted messages has been around for years and I think the time has come for the oldies, (such as myself), to accept that it’s sadly here to stay. That being said, I found my way to this blog whilst looking for good pages to direct people to when they send me HTML email.
Whilst it’s (questionably) acceptable to send HTML messages to me personally, I consider it quite unacceptable to use it for sending messages to my ’special’ addresses, such as abuse@, postmaster@, etc. No doubt my policy will infuriate those who wish to contact my abuse desk, but if they want to complain badly enough, they will no doubt figure it out.
December 2nd, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Man, this site is
/**incredible!**/ stop
I imagine many of you
have at some stage
written (not typed) a
letter to the local paper
complaining about
detoriating English
standards, and todays
rude youth. stop.
It must have been a
sad for some of you
when the binary efficiency
of morse code and
telegraphs was superceded
by wastefully verbose
telephones. stop.
Trying to restrict how
people communicate to
(your personal) text
protocols is a little
Orwellian isn’t it?
full stop.