There are still some of us out there, an ever dwindling group I’m sure, who don’t want images or borders or colors or bold fonts in an E-mail. I know that using HTML markup to send fancy-pants E-mail is popular with the kids these days, I even begrudgingly support it in my own webmail client. But for the love of all that is holy, if you are going to send HTML formatted E-mails (or any other rich text format), please do it correctly – INCLUDE A TEXT VERSION.

The MIME standard, which defines the structure of “modern” E-mail messages, already supports exactly what you need: Just use “multipart/alternative”, and send a text only version along with the wiz-bang HTML copy you spent a week styling (most of which any sane client will strip out anyway). it’s not rocket science, and even though these standards are decades old, it’s surprising how many companies and services still get it wrong. In the last few weeks alone, I have run across the following:

No text part at all

This is the most common. You didn’t even try to send a text version of the content. Keep in mind, it’s not just curmudgeons like myself who won’t read your message, but people with accessibility requirements (think blind people using screen readers) are also going to have a hard time finding the content hidden in 50 nested divs. Why do you hate blind people?

HTML markup in the text part

You tried, I will give you credit for that. But you failed miserably, because now I get a text message with a bunch of raw HTML tags and useless style rules with some content buried deep within. Thanks, but no thanks.

A text part without the same content

You included a text part. It’s not raw HTML thank goodness. Sadly, it’s just a short message to click a link and read the HTML version online. I’m not going to click that link. Another common one is just an empty text part with no content at all. I appreciate your brevity! My favorite offender in this category is a major bank I do business with. They periodically send me E-mail with an HTML part and text part, yay! unfortunately, the text part is always the same. It simply reads:

TEXT VERSION

Very helpful! I know LARGE BANKS have low standards for software development, but this is ridiculous.

Incorrect or missing character set

I can almost forgive you for this. You sent a text part. It has the same content as the HTML version and isn’t markup. But you used non-ASCII characters and did not include the correct character set header. The result is highly likely to render incorrectly. And you were so close to getting it right!

In conclusion, please be kind to aging oldsters like myself, and send a properly formatted text version of whatever you want me to read. Then I can write happy fun-time blog posts about rainbows instead of ranting about E-mail formats. Eh, I will probably still rant about E-mail formats, but I do like rainbows.