Two reasons to not like/trust HTML mail.
HTML makes it easier to embed viruses and malware. It is very hard to include malware in 7-bit ASCII.
HTML mail is hard to manipulate outside of an HTML aware email package or a browser. Life is much simpler when the text is just text. One can send images as attachments when they are needed.
Not every email client displays HTML the same way, it was a constant problem that made some HTML emails completely unreadable. It used to be impossibly bad, but that was 15 - 20 years ago, it may be better now, especially as it seems to be 90% Gmail to Gmail.
I remember when I was sending out my HTML newsletters I had to deal with limited allowed code, some email clients stripping out entire sections of it before displaying it, and additional proprietary code being added in at annoying places pushing images out of alignment.
I voted for plain text. My age? There’s a Beatles song about it.
I run Gmail.com in Basic Mode(*), which defaults to plain text writing, though displaying incoming html messages “correctly.” I’m not even sure how to switch Gmail Basic mode to write html – I’ve never wanted to. The fancy visual effects of html are just a nuisance as often as not. Usually copy-paste works to get text from displayed html. (Sometimes I need to run a program of my own design to separate text from html.)
I started running Gmail in Basic Mode because I needed to – I had slow Internet connection. But even with fast Internet I prefer its interface immensely. Recently I noticed a bug in Gmail Basic Mode. Someone sent me a very long message, formatted with html; it was truncated with a place to click “Display entire message.” But clicking that button gave me an error message. “Display original message” did work, but shows all the html tags. I could have run that through afore-mentioned filter program, but decided to switch temporarily to Gmail’s Standard View instead.
WARNING: If you prefer Gmail’s Basic Mode, be very careful about switching to Standard View. There may be no easy way to get back to Basic Mode! I Googled for help and found a way
(1) Find a slow Internet connection. (You cannot switch back to Basic Mode if you have hi-speed Internet. :smack: )
(2) After logging in to Gmail, a “Basic Mode” option will appear very briefly in the lower right of the window.
(3) Click the option quickly! If you miss, you’ll need to log-out and try again.
(4) Once in Basic Mode, there will be a “Make Basic Mode the Default” option. Click there or you’ll need to repeat from (1) next time.
I’ve got other complaints about the company whose motto was once Do No Evil. But all is relative; at least they’re not killing babies … or committing electoral frauds.
Originally posted by SeaDragonTattoo:
>> I do that thing with answering questions in
>> colored text, why would you want to specifically
>> block that? It really makes answering a long
>> list of questions easier and shorter without
>> having to copy and re-format what the asking
>> emailer wrote, with new paragraphs and trying to
>> break it out clearly into Q and A that’s understandable."
You make a good argument but take that same intended-for-HTML-interpretation message and view it as text only and you have a hard time isolating the answer from the question. So what is elegant for you is cumbersome for me. I personally would prefer the sender just make new paragraphs for answers.
>> Is it that some email programs (like Outlook and
>> the like) have a hard time following the formatting
>> so you end up with weird looking pages, something else?
Yes. I use the Zimbra client and keep it up to date. It still regularly (but to be fair, not frequently) displays HTML messages in not-easy-to-follow ways. When I’m mid way through a message and say “I wonder what the sender intended here?”, you know the basic function of e-mail has failed.