Re: FN-FORUM: RE: MIME email type

date posted 13th March 2006 11:54

Alain Williams wrote:

>>> From: "D D Glendinning" [EMAIL REMOVED]
>>> Morning All,
>>>
>>> Right, this is puzzling and wanted your take(s) on this. I am setting
>>> up my email with a small banner at the bottom as a footer. So the
>>> email is HTML. Am doing this in Thunderbird, and works fine. I am
>>
>>
>> HTML email is a vile abomination that should not be encouraged in any
>> way.
>>
>> Why:
>>
>> * The mail reader often does not have everything that it needs to
>> display
>> the email, that means it needs access to the web to display the mail.
>> * It is slower -- web accesses take time
>> * It cannot always be done offline
>> * It is a security risk - who knows what is embedded in the html
>> * Spammers love it -- include some unique identifier in a url that
>> your mail
>> reader fetches and bingo, they know that they have a live email
>> account
>> * Different renderers display the mail differently
>> * It increases the size of email
>>
>> What does it add ?
>>
>> Errrm, the ability to have fancy fonts & colours in email ....
>>
>> Sorry: I read email for it's content, not to see the pretty colours.
>
> Dave Cross wrote:

> Alain,
>
> I couldn't agree with you more. See http://dave.org.uk/email.html for
> more on my opinions on the subject.
>
> A couple of other articles on the subject that you might be interested
> in:
>
> Basic Bulk Email
> http://blog.dave.org.uk/archives/000873.html
>
> Phishing Protection
> http://blog.dave.org.uk/archives/000682.html
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dave...
>

Although I agree with what you are saying in terms of security,
companies are increasingly seeing HTML emails as their main way of
communicating with the client base. Eurostar for instance does no
offline DM work, relying only on HTML emails as a replacement for their
tradtional DM work. The budgets for this work are quite large, and
somethign I am sure alot of people on this list would like to be
involved in rather than starving for the sake of an uneconomic philosophy.