Betalogue ponders slow death of plain text
Pierre Igot at Betalogue got the Red Hot Chilli Peppers promotional email from the iTunes Music Store today.
It prompts him to provide a good / cranky summary 
(depending on whether you are a plain text / HTML person) of reasons to dislike HTML emails.
He also wonders whether emails like this are a sign that plain-texters are on the verge of extinction:
…it’s yet another sign that plain-text e-mail is becoming more and more neglected…. Sooner or later, I guess that I too will be forced to switch to HTML e-mail. It really annoys me, because I believe that my reasons for preferring plain-text e-mail are perfectly valid and will remain so for many years to come. But if plain-text e-mail becomes less and less usable, we simply won’t have any other alternative. And Apple will have a certain amount of responsibility in this.
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Tags: Apple Mail, email, HTML, iTunes, mail.app, plain text, RTF
April 5th, 2006 at 2:21 am
The only win win for plain text is that it’s reasonably easy to control across the board — meaning hotmail and outlook and gmail and mail all view it just fine. HTML email still suffers from the inconsistencies (and pure laziness) of each of these email clients stripping out code for their own gain — and they have no reason to say it’s too hard, when open source systems like roundcube.net support the browsers code perfectly. They may also benefit from increased phishing pressure.
I’ll say this, though — from a marketing standpoint, nothing sells worse than a plain text email. The average user doesn’t respond to it, they glaze over it like they do most of their emails.
April 5th, 2006 at 2:33 am
Hmm. I don’t know about that. It all depends on the sender and their history as to whether my eyes glaze over. For instance, Apple Developer Group = interesting. Blastbeats.com = very interesting! Discover card = glaze-over. The content is quite important here.
April 5th, 2006 at 3:01 am
I’d agree — but the arguement is if discover card sent you plain text or a snazzy graphic, which one would get a look? You may not be interested, but we’re in the market of grabbing your eyes for a second, the rest is up to you.
April 5th, 2006 at 4:41 am
[...] Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Betalogue ponders slow death of plain text [...]
April 5th, 2006 at 4:45 am
Plain-text won’t be dead until either no clients can read it or you quit sending it. I don’t see either happening any time soon.
April 5th, 2006 at 7:18 am
I thought that one of the most telling points Pierre made was the inattention paid by Apple to the plain text alternative.
It says — in fact — that the plain text alternative is not really regarded as an alternative at all.
April 5th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
[...] Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Betalogue ponders slow death of plain text [...]
April 7th, 2006 at 4:32 am
Plain text isn’t going to die just yet. There are still a lot of LISTPROC-type mailing lists (including many Topica lists) that can’t parse HTML or RTF email. Messages sent to lists of this ilk are often rendered as blank.
So fret not – plain text is still the gold standard for email correspondence.