HTML Email And (Not) You
HTML email is everywhere. We use it to send emails with formatting far beyond what was available to us with simple text-only email. Lists look more like the lists we're used to seeing in documents and on web pages, headings look like actual headings, and we can even throw in some images to enhance our communications.
The problem with all this is that you have no assurances that anyone else sees your email the way you wrote it. You can make it look good, but you have to consider how it looks to people using a different email client. As shown by the Email Standards Project's clients list, not everyone has the same level of support for properly displaying HTML email. Unfortunately it is one of the most popular email clients, Microsoft Outlook, that lacks proper HTML support. One of the problems with standards is that there's so many to choose from and so many ways to interpret each one.
HTML email also presents a size issue. All well-behaved clients will send a plain-text version of the same email along with the message, just in case the recipient can't handle HTML email. For most of us, sitting at home or at work using our computers, this isn't really a big deal and will go completely unnoticed in virtually all cases. Not everyone is sitting at home though; some users are mobile, and at least in Canada that means both coping with an absurdly low data cap or paying an exorbitant fee for a more reasonable data cap, as well as paying a different yet also exorbitant fee for going over your monthly data usage. Most mobile email applications, as far as I'm aware, won't download attachments unless asked. Images included in the email message aren't attachments though, and so they're downloaded with the message. Too many of these can push people over their meager limits, with potentially expensive results. Although that story comes from an American traveler over two years ago, the situation hasn't improved very much on either data caps or data charges and carriers seem disinterested in what customers want.
The moral of today's story is to consider other people, even when sending email. Until such time, if it ever comes, when Microsoft Outlook, Windows Live Hotmail and Google GMail support HTML email properly, that means sending email only in plain text if only to make sure your email is actually seen the way you intend. It's not such a bad thing either — it makes you think about what you're really trying to get across, and trying to use fancy formatting and emoticons in a plain-text email looks far less professional. Even if you completely ignore that (perhaps your company mandates a specific client so you always know how the recipient will view your message), please do try to send plain-text anyway in consideration of mobile users, at least until reasonably-priced unlimited data plans become the rule rather than the (currently non-existent in Canada) exception. Non-corporate users and your corporate finance department alike will thank you.
