We have always used Rich Text or Plain Text in our MS Outlook at work. Recently some people have changed their format to HTML.
Is there any virus concerns here? I mean any greater with an HTML format rather than Rich Text or Plain Text.
I think the biggest reason is given by numbers 3 and 4 on Floater’s link: incompatibility. Since there are many e-mail users out there who don’t have it, your mail will not be read the way you’ve formatted it by some people.
If the messages are strictly within your company and you all use Outlook, then I guess it doesn’t matter. But my e-mail program at home doesn’t display HTML. If you were to forward me a message, I would get a plain text portion followed by the HTML part - something in the server-to-server communications breaks it up and sends the plain text first. So I’d see the your message in plain text, followed by an attachment that’s an HTML file.
Some servers, notably the Hotmail one when it’s set to send HTML messages, don’t break it up, so if a Hotmail user sends me a message in HTML, all I get is the HTML attachment, which I either have to look at as raw text and read between the HTML tags, or launch the file in my web browser, which I can’t then reply to.
Just say no to HTML! Of course, this also applies to RTF.
I don’t see any reason to use anything other than plain text for e-mail.