When it comes to HTML E-mails, we have the problem of many. There are so many different tools for reading email that it becomes virtually impossible to cater to all. There are desktop software such as Pegasus, Outlook, AOL, Thunderbird, and Lotus Notes, to web-based email services such as Yahoo!, Hotmail, and GMail. To make matters worse, a sizeable amount of the population these days access their mails using mobile devices like the Blackberry. Each of these email software tools can display the same email in vastly different ways. Also mail clients are light-years away as compared to browsers when it comes to rendering HTML.
The Problems
Different mail clients interpret HTML e-mails differently
Some do not support CSS while some strip off images and tables. So there is a chance that the recipient does not see what the sender intends.
HTML Emails are heavy
HTML e-mails are always at least twice the size of plain text mails since they are embedded with markup tags and formatting.
Annoying and expensive for mobile users
Today, many users access their mails on their mobile devices (Blackberry and Smartphones) and they pay for every KB of data downloaded. HTML mails with images and markup hurt these users. Also, most mobile mail clients cannot handle HTML tables, images, formatting and javascripts.
Web-based emails break HTML emails
Many web-based email services (including the popular Google Mail) deletes the CSS styles between any Style tags and embedded images are delivered as attachments. Some render the mail with the HTML tags making the content unreadable.
HTML e-mails can connect to the internet by itself
If an HTML e-mail includes references to online images then (by default) Dial-Up Networking will try to connect to the internet to download those images. These images can also be used to set and retrieve cookies. This can be annoying for the recipient
HTML e-mail is dangerous
Since HTML can include scripts, HTML email is obviously more of a security risk than plain text, and the most recent viruses have made full use of this flaw.
The Solution
The thumb-rule is to send plain vanilla text e-mails. If, at all, it is necessary to send HTML e-mails, then the technique described below will make it more accessible and safe.
- Do not use images, CSS and Javascripts
- Do not use tables and multi-column layouts
- Use H1, H2, h4, P tags to differentiate between the content levels
- Give a link in the e-mail to the full version hosted in the server so that the user can visit is if he so desires
Example 1 : Text E-mail
Example 2 : HTML E-mail
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