HTML E-mail: Must you send an alternate plain text view as well?

Question

When sending HTML e-mail, I understand that it's a best practice to send a plain text version as well.

But my question is: Must you send a plain text version as well?

What are the repercussions?

Hexa

Answer 1

You never have to. If the recipient however, is unable to receive HTML emails or their client does not support them then chances are the HTML will be displayed as plain text. Also, some email providers/clients like Verizon, GMail or Outlook will strip out certain tags so you HTML is malformed.

Sigrid

Answer 2

At least as far as Outlook 2007 is concerned, there are no reprecussions. We have an internal app that sends out emails in HTML format only and Outlook doesn't complain and renders the HTML content.

Sending an email with a plain-text version is simply common courtesy to support email clients that either don't support HTML format, or have their client set to render plain-text only. It's actually more prevalent than you may think so if you can either ask the user their preference or send both.

Nadinenadir

Answer 3

Ideally you should collect the user preference of email and send the email based on this preference, it is impossible to guess what they prefer. This is not so much a best practice thing as opposed to a user preference, though it is rare now that users have email clients incapable of rendering html content, this does not preclude however email clients blocking html content (like GMail, Outlook) unless explicitly allowed by the user.

Savoie

Answer 4

On my humble opinion you must think on the receivers of the mail you are trying to send. I mean, if they have Mail User Agents that support a given format or not.

Also, you should be aware of making a compatible HTML e-mail otherwise it won't be interpreted right on every Mail User Agent.

Hope that helps,

Valor

Answer 5

Think that, for example, Gmail interface shows in the header the first lines of the e-mail, and Outlook does too, if you send an HTML e-mail without plain text version, the text won't be displayed, at least in my case.

What I've seen from dozens of e-mails is that they normally include a line that tells:

If your e-mail client doesn't support HTML go to http://....

Another thing that I can tell you is that, for example, the iPhone downloads first the plain text message, and later the html formatted one.

Babarababassu

Touché! That is a mistake on my part, but what I wanted to tell is that normally a small part of the message gets sent in plain text, I'll update the answer – Selfrestraint