Why plain text e-mails suck
Annoyance September 23rd, 2007Without words:
Update:
I did not expect that the disadvantages of plain text e-mails ca not be seen at a glance. However, here the points you can detect from the images:
- you can not tell which part of the e-mail is the signature (often filled with its bland legal texts) and which is the important part
- the e-mail takes nearly twice the space of an HTML e-mail and still does not fit into that window
- there are no clickable links for URLs, Skype addresses etc.
- the company logo is missing
Still, there are much more disadvantages which I do not want to mention here. The worst situation is when you are having a long conversation with sombody using HTML e-mails and then someone joins with his plain text e-mail client and destroys your e-mail. All that remains is a fragmented text with lots of unnecessary white spaces and line brakes, e-mail body and signature mixed up and in most cases all your umlauts (ä, ü, ö) or other characters are replaced by some strange ASCII characters.
September 25th, 2007 at 08:40
Aehm, man kann die garnicht groß klicken um zu verstehen was genau dich stört :)
September 25th, 2007 at 17:20
Hi Jonny,
some thoughts on your arguments:
“you can not tell which part of the e-mail is the signature (often filled with its bland legal texts) and which is the important part”
This is wrong. Signatures are separated from the main text by “– ” (without the quotation marks) and email clients are encouraged to display the signature in a different style, e.g. brighter than the main text. If your mail client does not do this, it’s a disadvantage of your mail client, not the plain text format.
“the e-mail takes nearly twice the space of an HTML e-mail and still does not fit into that window”
The plain text mail takes less disk space and is smaller when sending it. If you do not like the font (probably Courier or something like that) your mail client shows plain text mails, change that to a font like Verdana, where an “i” is more narrow than a “w”.
This, again, has nothing to do with plain text in general. It’s a representation problem.
Why do plain-text-mails not fit right into the window? E.g., Outlook 2007 wraps the mail accordingly, and removes unneccessary line breaks. Where’s the problem?
“there are no clickable links for URLs, Skype addresses etc.”
I don’t know, which email client you are using, Outlook 2007 for example shows URLs as clickable links even in plain text mails, as long as they start with “http://”.
“the company logo is missing”
Embedding images in mails is in my opinion a very bad idea, anyway, since it wastes a lot of disk space and transfer volume. Loading the images dynamically from a web server is often blocked by mail clients.
Moreover, HTML mails are potential virus hosts, since they might contain scripts (which, of course, SHOULD be filtered out by mail clients, but not all of them do).
Have a nice day,
Golo
September 26th, 2007 at 18:56
Hello Golo!
“Signatures are separated from the main text by ‘– ‘ [..].”
Actually it should be two hyphens, but neverthless you are right.
Son of RFC 1036
The problem is that e-mail clients insert a “>” at the beginning of each line every time you reply. In this case signatures are not recognized any longer and so they are not displayed differently. Of course, the sender should remove unnecessary parts from the e-mail, but most people just fullqoute e-mails.
“If you do not like the font [..] your mail client shows plain text mails, change that to a font like Verdana.”
Changing the font to non-monospace one risky, because many people are trying to format their e-mails by using white spaces (e.g. to center a headline) and extra line brakes. For this reason Outlook’s behavior of removing line brakes is not always well. How can Outlook detect if the extra line break (e.g. before an URL) is wanted or not?
“Why do plain-text-mails not fit right into the window? E.g., Outlook 2007 wraps the mail accordingly [..].”
This can lead to another problem. Mostly plain text e-mails have a hard coded line break after about 70 characters. If the e-mail client forces a line break to a avoid a horizontal scrollbar, the message will look like this:
“Outlook 2007 for example shows URLs as clickable links even in plain text mails, as long as they start with ‘http://’”
That is the point. There are much more protocols than http. What about skypeto, nntp, afp, news and itms?
“Embedding images in mails is in my opinion a very bad idea, anyway, since it wastes a lot of disk space and transfer volume.”
Come on, we are living in the year 2007. These few extra bytes for an embedded image will not hurt. ;-) Same point goes to the amount of disk space and transfer volume…
Actually in this example screenshot the logo was not an image, but a simple text with some style properties.
“Moreover, HTML mails are potential virus hosts, since they might contain scripts [..].”
Ok, this is in fact a danger of HTML e-mails.