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Comment by benihana | Hacker News Reader

Because the vast majority of people enjoy pretty emails with non-monospaced fonts, whitespace and colors. It's mostly hackers who want to show off how old school they are that complain about html emails. Also, most emails like this have a text version you can receive - I believe it's necessary for CANSPAM compliance.

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I very much prefer for emails to contain text only, or with HTML only as attachments, and it has absolutely zero to do with any desire to show off to other people.

For me, it's all about keeping some control over technology. I tell a very limited program like mutt what to do, and it does it. This is in contrast to begging an incredibly complicated program like a browser to do something, where much of what it is doing is controlled by invisible embedded code written by people who may be hostile toward me.

> For me, it's all about keeping some control over technology.

That's fair enough, but you are very much in a minority.

Do you know of any usability research or somesuch that confirms this?

I spent some years working at an email-specific agency. They sent more than 5 billion emails during that time for some very big clients, and we did most of the data analysis. They also did a lot of usability testing.

I can tell you that on just about every metric - brand recall, clickthrough rates, ROI, unsubscribes - HTML outperformed plain text. There were exceptions, both in terms of types of campaign and types of sender - say, if your list includes lots of Hacker News readers.

We found, for example, that including just one image will increase open rates by more than 50% but I can't find it now. Another article on the same topic is here - http://www.alchemyworx.com/alchemy_worx/2009/newsletter/issu....

Ok, I am aware of the higher click rates, but that is part of my point. Well crafted imagery is no doubt more catchy and attention getting than plain text. However, is visual stimulation (manipulation?) supposed to be a part of communication medium? Between the reasons for why HTML should be in emails, where do you rank recipients well-being compared to ROI?

Unfortunately, an un-branded email looks suspicious and unprofessional nowadays. You'll get more complaints and unsubs than ever versus a well-crafted (not over-the-top) engaging layout.

Images and fonts are a very valid and useful tools for communication. Even the most old-school, respectable newspapers use images, graphics, and a variety of fonts--even in their most serious news stories.

The minority that won't get hit by the next worm.

It's boring to see everything being reinvented again, just with more color and horrible mistakes.

A quick note to web.de and gmx.whatever who send mails as HTML-only: you suck

I don't think anyone is better off getting graphics and colors in their email, even if they enjoy it. After all, the email is supposed to inform of something. A website can be an interactive app, but email?

Also, text-only doesn't mean monospace. I'm happy to read email in whatever sans-serif font the email client picks, with nice whitespacing.

>A website can be an interactive app, but email?

Fortunately, most e-mail clients support a "show this e-mail in text only" view mode. This means that you can have it your way, and others can have it theirs!

Yeah, I do that every time!

The problem is that "show this E-mail in text only" relies on the fact that whatever they use send out the E-mail also sends plain text as well as HTML as a multipart. I find most of places do that, but there are some services/implementations that simply sends out HTML, pretty much leaving it up to the mailer to interpret that E-mail.

Either you will be sending in HTML or plain text, I feel there shouldn't be any excuse of not attaching plain text version of it.

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