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Comment by jarin | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly the reason emails come in two parts (text and HTML). You can tell your client to only show plaintext emails if you're so inclined (just like you can tell Firefox to only use your own personal stylesheet).

Personally, I prefer the HTML emails and find them faster to go through. It takes me about 2 seconds to skim a Thinkgeek mailer with product images and see if there's anything interesting, vs. having to actually read the entire email and click a bunch of links.

Then there are all the nice graphs and colors in the server monitoring emails I get that let me get a big picture overview of the server farm health at a glance every week. If I see any red or too many spikes, I can decide whether to investigate further or get back to coding.

For all the benefits I get from HTML email, I'll risk the small chance that getting an email with Paula's pink hearts theme will seriously fuck up my day.

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Not all HTML messages include a text section. I just looked at the raw message of 6 HTML emails and only two of them had multipart/alternative sections. But if it could be agreed upon to always send both, I think that would be good.

And for sure, you do make some good points on where HTML email can be a good thing. Perhaps I'm being too pessimistic.

That's my beef with them too. I prefer text emails, since I do a lot of my email reading on the CLI. It's true, and annoying, that a fair amount don't include multipart/alternative sections. For me it's not a huge problem as I have plugins that will extract the text from the HTML and present the text only, but it's not exactly a great reader experience.

Much much worse, however, are all of the people/companies that include multipart/alternative sections, but do it completely wrong: "This is an HTML-email. Your client lacks HTML support. Please visit [url here] to view this email" or even worse "This is an HTML-email. Your client lacks HTML support. Please upgrade your software".

I come across these almost daily, and it bugs the hell out of me. Unless it is something very important (bill, sign-up email, etc.) I simply ignore these emails, and they never get read. (Yes, it really is out of spite. I'll ignore them when reading email in a web client or on my phone later. They simply lost their chance)

I don't really like HTML mail, but I can live with it. I see the reason why it exists (great for advertisement). However, if you use HTML email, do include multipart/alternative section for non-HTML clients, and include the same information there, non of this "your client can't handle HTML, you loose crap".

It's actually a pretty bad idea to use multipart in that way anyway, as having very different html and plain text content in your email is a flag for spam filters.

> You can tell your client to only show plaintext emails if you're so inclined (just like you can tell Firefox to only use your own personal stylesheet).

I can't find the option in Outlook 2010. It's made working through my inbox more frustrating then it need be.

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