In case it wasn’t already delightfully obvious, I prefer plain text. Html has a place. It can be wonderfully crafted into well laid out and cleverly designed websites thanks to web standards. The web abounds with examples of this. It does not however increase the efficiency or clarity of our business communication. E-mail is not the same as a web page. Your poor grammar is unaided by the bold font and bullets. Your signature would mean just as much if it was plain text. And no one really likes multicolored, animated smilies anyway. I understand that many, many people do not see this, they simply can not understand the superiour value of plain text email as a communication medium.
I honestly did not understand the full scope of this until recently returning to a corporate environment after several years of independent consulting. The clear dependence on html formatted emails, what some refer to as “rich text”, is entirely wasteful of internet bandwidth. As an example, using emails I have actually received. Given the same message located on my imap server, one saved using evolution with full html formatting intact; the other saving a plain text copy thanks to mutt (my MUA of choice):
$ du -h mail.msg.txt 4.0K mail.msg.txt
$du -h mail.msg.html 24K mail.msg.html
For this example, using real world sample emails, the html email is SIX TIMES larger than the plain text version. Assuming a large amount of correspondence for any given day, about 100 individual messages, the difference between 400k and 2400k starts to be noticeable, html email generating 2MB a day more of traffic. Now in all honesty, with the bandwidth available today that amount is negligible, but there are many other valid arguments against html email worth considering. Plain text email is immune to viruses, common spammer tricks like html tables and hidden text are negated, security risks from inline images and other html elements are removed, accessbility for is increased for people using screen readers and anyone who can not use a graphical interface.
Thankfully I’m not the only person who feels this way. This issue has been around for several years and deserves much more attention than it gets. The folks at the Ascii Ribbon Campaign have a nice one page overview as well more links and instructions for configuring your email client to send plain text emails.
My favorite summation of all the reasons (taken from George Dillon): HTML email can be dangerous, is not always readable, wastes bandwidth and is simply not necessary.
Not convinced? (and why would you be?). Take a look at some of the following links:
- Email is not a platform for design – Jeffrey Zeldman
- When is e-mail like a bad website? – also Jeffrey Zeldman
- HTML E-mail is STILL evil – George Dillon
- Force mail.app to display plain text by default – maxosxhints.com
Thanks for reading.
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ASCII ribbon campaign ( )
against HTML e-mail X
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