On Mon, 9 Dec 2019, Maarten Oelering via mailop wrote:
Multipart messages with html and text alternatives are generally
considered best practice. Senders with html templates should add a
text version is the common believe.
But it's almost 2020, and we were wondering if there's still a good
reason for adding plain text to a html message. Is there a
significant audience reading in plain text? Is plain text important
for accessibility? Because SpamAssassin says so?
Would be great to get feedback from this diverse and knowledgable community.
As a colour-blind techie I would love to say that you can't drop plain
text for security reasons, but if Bruce Schneier can do it
https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/2018/0715.html#cg1
then I'm not going to argue.
I receive html emails and read them in the cross-platform
text-based MUA "alpine" without significant problems.
There was a recent thread here suggesting that one of the major
email platforms is currently not displaying plain text emails;
I am not sure whether that was a bug or a feature.
Sadly, I think that in 2020 you *can* get away without plain text emails
if you are prepared to risk loosing a small (but probably not shrinking)
audience.
Perhaps the bigger question is what features of html add value
to your target audience ?
While I *can* read html messages, I rarely find them more useful than
a simple message with a link to the current newsletter or similar
(and a link short enough that line-wrapping does not break it).
If someone values colours, pictures and lot of links, is email a major
form of communication for them, or do they prefer and engage more with
social media ?
As I see it there are three groups of email users:
1 people who predominantly use text email,
2 people who use email which happens to be html
3 people who have email accounts but are more likely to see
things on social media and other web sources.
If you are focused on 3, you probably don't need to worry about 1,
but then you need to ask whether you should be emailing.
I imagine that 2 is the biggest group but I'm not sure that they would
get more from a message which doesn't work for people in group 1.
--
Andrew C. Aitchison Kendal, UK
and...@aitchison.me.uk
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