It’s certainly a difficult balance to strike. I know plenty of people who only accept plain text emails and even more companies that only send HTML emails.

From a business perspective I’d expect companies to be concerned about appearing to send phishing emails to customers. I still get plenty of false positives from my mail client because HTML email is used to display one URL when the link is to another even in legitimate mail.

Also, I think one of those ’standards’ should be to always send every message in both plain text and HTML format, that way the end user can always choose which version they would like to see. If that could be done at the level of the email headers, then people who prefer text emails wouldn’t even have to download the HTML code.

I agree, my chances of convincing people to send plain text emails are low but I also think it important to highlight that users have a choice. With the Web you have to use one of the flavours of (X)HTML and standards are applicable whatever you do. With email you don’t have to send HTML email, you can make a choice and I suspect a lot of people don’t realise that.

I also wonder if the days of HTML email, and particularly HTML email newsletters, are numbered?

I’m sure many people feel overwhelmed by the amount of mail they get in their inbox. If you couple the deluge of marketing email with the fact that HTML email makes it considerably easier to run phishing attacks etc. Your average user could easily start voting with their feet and unsubscribing to email newsletters (or opting for plain text) on the grounds of increased productivity and increased security.

A further consideration is the time needed to effect change. It’s taken the best part of a decade to really hammer home the concept of Web standards and even now the vast majority of sites don’t stick to the standards.

With email the problems are likely to be much greater, I think it’s reasonable to expect that it will take longer to challenge the norm and even longer to get real change.

However, I don’t think this is a reason for you not to try, if HTML email is really here to stay then I welcome your efforts to improve it for all. I just wonder if the general acceptance of email by users will change before improvements are seen and these changes will negate the need for standards anyway.

As tech people, we are so far out of the normal range for email users that we really can’t generalise our own opinions too far.

“The project aims to explain why Web standards are important for email. To any techie worth their salt the whole idea must grate horribly”

This is clearly the position designers and techies has held for 10 years, but to what end? HTML email is far more popular than ever, and email is growing, not dying.

You are of course welcome to try to convince people to only send plain text, because that is what you think is better, but honestly your chances of that having any impact are pretty low.

That’s not to say that some things are not better send via other mediums, but email, and HTML email, is not going anywhere anytime soon.

The Email Standards Project is asking designers to recognise that HTML email is a fact of life, it will be sent whether you personally like it or not.

Everyone should be sending multipart plain text and html, so you should always have a nice plain text alternative.

But for the many people who prefer HTML, they should be able to get lightweight, accessible, well designed HTML.

That’s what we are trying to achieve.

Make your 404 pages smarter with metaphone matching

I personally think websites with too many graphics and annoying Flash stuff are horrible anyway. If I wanted to open a website in a new smaller window, I’d select “Open Link in New Window” from the context menu, and then resize the window.

The worst example I have ever heard was a designer who said that the website he was designing was aimed at “cultural creatives”, none of whom are disabled in any way apparently, and they all have 15″ monitors, according to him. So my pleas for accessibility and fluid layouts fell on deaf ears (and it was impossible to adapt his design to a fluid layout). Grr. Then six months later the client realised they should have listened to me. Ha. Ha. Ha.