Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 6th Dec 2007 16:27 UTC
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Member since:
2005-07-06
There are several reasons:
- the number of EMail users who can't view HTML EMail is actually increasing (thanks to the rise in EMail-capable handheld devices).
- it's unnecessarily wasteful of bandwidth, especially since most mail clients send two versions of the same message (plain-text and HTML) to accommodate clients that can't view HTML.
- most of the capabilities of HTML that *would* be useful in EMail have been disabled because of their potential for abuse (want to send out a web-based form by EMail? Too bad, since it won't work with the latest versions of Outlook).
- spammers often use uniquely-named images in EMails for address validation (if there's any traffic to the image, then they know the address is valid) - so newer EMail clients don't load images automatically.
- and on a more subjective level, it enables annoying crap like "IncrediMail" (if you've ever received an EMail with auto-playing background audio or animations in the signature, you know what I mean).
I'm not one of those "purists" who believe that all EMail should be plain-text and nothing else - I just wish that there was some standard for text formatting in EMail that wasn't quite so heavyweight compared to plain text (the size of a message shouldn't quadruple simply because a word has been italicized).