This evening I had a short discussion about one of Gmail's new features: Image insertion. I was kind of curious about the feature, until I realized ugh, this requires HTMLized email. Yeah, I'm one of those people who still thinks that HTML email is, you know, wrong.
I'll cheerfully admit some of my anti-HTML email bias is a holdover from the days when I used text-based mailers. Those days, though, are largely gone: I use Gmail for a huge amount of my mail, and Thunderbird or Groupwise for work email. Mutt just doesn't cut it for the way I work with email anymore, unfortunately.
So, my mailers support HTML, but I still exchange mail with a lot of people who don't use mailers that support it.. or just turn it off. It's sort of taboo in the FOSS community, where a lot of people still eye HTML email with suspicion.
What do you think? HTML email: evil, annoying, or mandatory?
8 Comments
Regardless of my own feelings towards HTML email (don't really use it), I just did a check of my inbox folder at work. About a third of all emails contain HTML, both from external and internal people.
This is in no way representative, but to me it means that in my business, an email client that cannot handle HTML is lacking in functionality.
I vote for annoyingly evil, or possibly even evilly annoying.
Not only does it add unnecessary payload, even in today's world where it hardly seems like that much of a payload, but you have clients that might not render the view the same as another client would.
More importantly, HTML defeats the purpose of an email which is ... get the message to the reader! There's some that totally clutter up the mail with graphics and links up the wazoo that you sit there trying to figure where the actual message of the email is. Too much work and I automatically delete those that do that now.
HTML email is annoying but, unfortunately, mandatory, especially even receiving information from Novell or other online subscriptions.
Luckily, I can disable all the images in Thunderbird.
--Jinglett
It's not only worng, it is polluting the environment. Why does one need to ship around at least three times as many bytes than necessary?
Myself, I used mostly text emails but sometimes to be able to get my point across I have to send a image which one cannot do with plain text. As far as links one can still send them in text form and the user can copy and paste them into a browser if the sender is known and trusted. People today like having pics of children or grand children and things like this cannot be done with plain text without adding the evil attachment. We are caught in a world of people wanting to do evil things with computers and while users in Open Source do not like HTML it is a fact that many users do including IT.
With computers becoming modernized daily, restricting use is not the way to go but finding ways to prevent the disease that is going on now from continuing is the answer. We have programs now that can scan any email whether it be plain text or HTML for malware. I can honestly say using both Linux and Windows for the last 15 years I have never been infected with malware but than I use security and I am careful in what I do. We need to move forward and not limit ourselves to staying in the olden era of computing while the rest of the computer age goes on. Computing is way beyond just sending emails and developing programs, users watch movies, listen to music, talk with each other, keep close contact with family, transmit pictures of loved ones, CAD programs, provide security of homes, etc and there is no stopping this.
The rule of "conservative in what you send, liberal in what you expect" goes double for email. HTML mail seems to be more likely to get scored as spam.
I agree with ruurd, if the *content* of your message is what counts why does one need to ship around at least three times as many bytes than necessary?
HTML email is much better than plain text, in every respect except bandwidth (which is now irrelevant), as evidenced by the vast majority who have accepted it and use it daily. The only people who continue to advocate against it are a tiny minority of nerds who are stuck in the past, arguing with points that don't even apply anymore.
How much of your daily bandwidth is devoted to HTML from the Web? How much of your daily bandwidth is devoted to email? See the hypocrisy yet?
With HTML email, quoted text shows up in clearly-delimited blocks, with natural word wrap instead of archaic forced 72 character breaks, text can be emphasized, put in bullet points, switched between natural proportional font for prose, and fixed-width font blocks for code. It's more readable for the recipient, and easier to compose for the sender.
Should we make the Web plain text, too? “Yes! It’s sooo much more efficient!!1 Plain ASCII text ought to be enough for anybody to communicate anything!″
Even the author of “Why HTML in E-Mail A Bad Idea†got over it: http://birdhouse.org/blog/2006/01/15/html-email-the-poll/