Many mail clients don’t automatically show you the PDF, forcing you to open it separately, whereas HTML email most people can at least read the text without doing anything extra except maybe enabling the graphics. For a large number of people who use a web-based email client (Yahoo, HotMail, etc), an attachment is a barrier to reading the email.

Mark — Good question. We actually do that with our regular newsletter, though we no longer send it as an attachment, because it’s too big. Instead we upload it and point members to the link. For our weekly email, our aim is to be highly readable. Unfortunately, some people won’t read PDFs, or if they do, they don’t like them. Our biggest goal is to be read by the most people possible, and it seems HTML email wins the prize for that. Or at least that’s our sense based on early returns.

HTML email is more an more common, and most email clients have a feature to disable images only rather than all HTML code — GMail has the ability to remember which senders you would like to enable images from and turns off those from anyone else, which I find extremely useful.

Steve — I hear you. I probably was the least enthusiastic on the committee about doing this, for reasons related to what you talk about. I was also expecting more backlash, and it could yet happen, but so far all that I have heard has ranged from pleased to very pleased. And it’s eased some of our crazy production problems. It was unbelievable how hard it was for non-techies to produce a text email at times. I never in my wildest dreams thought text-email could be such a disaster. It reached an all-time low about a year ago when somehow (don’t ask me how), it added huge amounts of JavaScript to the email. It was not only unreadable, it was scary to many. One other thing that gives me solace: Constant Contact makes it possible to receive the email in text rather than HTML on an individual basis. This addresses some, though not all, of these concerns.

When my congregation’s leadership has asked about HTML-based email newsletter tools like Constant Contact, I’ve advised against them for the following reasons:

(1) HTML-formatted email is a dangerous computer security practice — The full details can be found in the following computer security article that comes from the Washington Post’s Brian Krebs “Security Fix” blog:

Do Away With HTML Based E-mail

In this article, Krebs makes the following points:

“But it gives Security Fix a good excuse to remind readers that viewing your e-mail in anything other than plain text mode is asking for trouble on a Windows computer.

Most e-mail software comes configured to relay messages both in text-only mode and HTML format, which allows for the rendering of graphics and other Web-based content. But blindly accepting HTML content from third parties is a bad idea on a number of levels. The most dangerous threat is HTML content that enables the silent downloading of malicious software. In addition, even if you’ve never replied to a single piece of junk e-mail, spammers can tell if they’ve got a working e-mail address if you merely view one of their HTML-based e-mail ads.”

“Likewise, sending e-mail in HTML mode is just a bad idea all around, and these days, it’s a recipe for making sure the messages you send get caught in the recipient’s junk mail folders. That’s because in an effort to bypass anti-spam technologies that look for spammy words in the body of the e-mail, a huge percentage of spam now arrives embedded in HTML code and in images.”

(2) HTML-formatted email may be rejected or formatting stripped out of recipient’s email — Due to the computer security issues mentioned in item #1, some users disable HTML-formatting. Corporate and government computer administrators will do the same. My work email account is set up have the HTML email toggled off. Most commercial email I see is an ugly jumble of HTML code until I toggle the HTML back on.

If you use plain text, your email will show up with you having more control about how it looks. It will also be compatible for users of PDA-based email (e.g. blackberrys, smart phones, etc).

For more information on the problems with using HTML-based or MIME-encoded email, check out the following web article:

What is wrong with sending HTML or MIME messages?
http://www.expita.com/nomime.html

That said, this nonprofit only sends out text email.