Proprietary HTML email rendering engines aren’t as common in webmail clients (duh, since they use the browser) but you’ll always see this on desktop apps (Lotus, Eudora, Apple Mail, Outlook 2007, etc).

It’s not that those companies are evil, and *want* things rendered wrong. It’s just because back when they first built their programs, that was all they could use—hacked together code for displaying “Rich Text.”

This is more an issue of old email applications than HTML email design.

The way most email marketers/designers can try to deal with this is they include a separate (albeit rarely used) “forward this to a friend” link.

From a marketing perspective, though, the HTML e-mail (when done well, if that’s even possible) has the right idea: it brings the user closer to styled content without requiring any extra action by the user.

After looking for a few months, I just landed my first job out of school (marketing webmaster, if you’re curious). While the big three career sites (Hot Jobs, Monster, and Career Builder) were ultimately frustrating, one of the best features shared by all three was a periodic HTML e-mail with job recommendations. A plain-text e-mail would have made the content less readable. A plain-text e-mail with a link to a site that actually had what I wanted would have been irritating.

That’s just talking about information that I was incredibly devoted to obtaining. What if we’re dealing with marketing campaigns (let’s say the type that users willingly participate in by allowing their information to be distributed)? There are lots of users who will not bother with following a link to the content. There are users who will not take the plain-text e-mail as seriously because it looks like any old plain-text e-mail.

So I understand the desire to keep e-mail lean. I certainly don’t like getting unsolicited e-leviathans in my inbox. But I also don’t see any chance of HTML e-mail campaigns dying any time soon.

Would Mr. Zelman write an entry on “nice” HTML emails he might receive?

Probably not, since Mr. Zeldman opts to receive plain text mail and knowingly uses a mail client whose HTML mail capabilities are contemptible.

I fail to see Mr. Zeldman’s point (other than trying to – indirectly- vilify HTML email). Would Mr. Zelman write an entry on “nice” HTML emails he might receive?

a) Old-skool techies who hate HTML mail for (valid) technical reasons
b) Regular folk who receive broken emails and don’t know why

The (a) users should be a non-issue, as far as their personal experience is concerned. MIME standards have been around for a long time (RFC1341 appeared in 1992, in fact). They’ve obviously developed since, but the basic implementation still works – you put all the different formats in one message and let the client/agent decide. Any user in segment (a) should be able to figure out how to make their email client display the text part of a MIME message only. Anything else – discard it.

Any decent email campaign should include a well-written, concise plain text version. It’s the closest thing we have to ‘degrading gracefully’. And frankly it’s actually pretty graceful.

As for the (b) users, well they don’t care or know if an email is HTML or rich text or plain text, any more than they know whether a website is standards-compliant or not. All they know is that on their screen, the email looks broken. In all likelihood, they delete it, and in all likelihood, whoever commissioned the broken email doesn’t know and/or doesn’t care. Because those users are perceived to represent a tiny, dare I say it, disposable fraction of the audience. It’s simple ROI – if the amount it costs to get that design working “for everyone” doesn’t outweigh the amount they’ll gain from the increased exposure, then there’s no point in doing it.

For a second, put yourselves into the heads of the marketers and understand something about email marketing – permissible, I mean: it’s a numbers game. If you have the subscriptions, it costs very little to send out 500,000 messages. You can’t think in terms of the ridiculously low response or conversion rates, think in terms of cost-per-lead (or cost per desired response). To the business person, it makes no more sense to spend the time to make an email message universally compatible than it does to include a braille version of a direct marketing mail piece.

Of course, none of that makes it “right” and it doesn’t mean that as designers/developers, we can’t sit down and (try to) educate the business people, or quietly make the email as compatible as possible, or indeed follow the previously-posted guidelines. Good luck doing that if you are given that Nokia mockup to code though.

(By the way, the old chestnut of ‘know your audience’ comes in here. Most likely the Nokia recipient FOB/MF Doom fans are not using Lotus Notes; in the same vein, if your audience is hardcore techies then you’d better send it in plain text (or as an RSS feed), as the comments here over the past few days prove.)

The wailing about bandwidth, I don’t buy. We’re quite happy to waste acres of bandwidth on YouTube and iTunes, the impact of legitimately-sent HTML emails is negligible. They don’t include the images in the email, they’re called up remotely. Or – increasingly – they aren’t called up at all.

Which brings me to the conclusion – HTML email in the form we know it is not going to be around much longer. Images are blocked by default in all the big web-based mail clients as well as in the newer Outlooks and Outlook Expresses. Alt attributes do show up; but in the MS products they are all prefaced with “Right-click here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of this picture from the internet”, effectively making them disappear. These are the default settings, and (say it with me!) most users do not change the default settings. I know I don’t; if the email makes no sense without images then I’ll move on. It’s at this point that I fall into the (b) group, by the way. When that group becomes significant enough to affect the bottom line, you’ll slowly see the shift away from things like the Nokia email.

So images in HTML emails are going the way of the dinosaur, as they can no longer be relied upon to communicate the message (or indeed the other thing for which images have been (ab)used – tracking who opened them, when and how many times).

HTML emails won’t be going away any time soon, if at all, but their form will change. The successful ones will use the medium to its effective limits; that is to say, simple accessible layouts, obvious links, appropriate text treatment, sensible use of colour and – last but not least – compelling copy. I’m not sure, but I think that’s progress?

@Derek — I think you’re exactly right. When the images ARE the content then they are paramount to design. As long as the email has a method to give you the information in text-only if you so desire (text descriptions and links to external page).

I’d like to see well-designed emails with minimal HTML usage. Perhaps HTML could be used to show a company logo, and to make links clickable in HTML clients, but the content is king, as they say, and if an email (HTML or plaintext) fails to deliver the message then it serves no purpose.

Just hit “Delete” and move on. Way too much energy has been expended on this topic.

Sorry, Dave. We didn’t mean to disturb you.

The files for this Nokia newsletter weigh in at an astonishing 630 kb!

Just…. wow!