[Web4lib] Generating html-only e-mail for e-newsletter purposes ?

Thomas Dowling tdowling at ohiolink.edu
Thu Jun 28 13:55:02 EDT 2007


On 6/28/2007 1:02 PM, Jonathan Bloy wrote:

> 
> Not to get into the whole html email debate... but if I was using an
> email client that did allow an html email to be viewed as html, even
> though I changed the settings otherwise, I would be VERY annoyed and
> would stop using that email client.  
> 


HTML e-mail works by sending the HTML markup as an attachment.  There's
a nice convention of sending a plain text version of the message in
addition to the HTML attachment, and letting the mail client decide
which to display.  In that case, the client should definitely make the
choice the recipient wants, not what the sender wants.

There are no mail police who will pull you over if you send only the
HTML attachment (though I hope it's clear to everyone that a lot of
recipients will resent this, which is probably not the reaction you
want).  In that case, a client should either display the HTML, offer to
save the attachment for you, or at least make it very clear that it's
converting HTML markup back to plain text.


-- 
Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu


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