Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the '10.4: Use Safari to create rich (HTML) messages in Mail' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
10.4: Use Safari to create rich (HTML) messages in Mail
Authored by: snuff on Jul 30, '06 12:44:23PM

Consider it "old-school" if you must, but e-mail - that is, data sent over the internet using the SMTP protocol - should be plain text. Heck, you shouldn't even send attachments (technically). The problem here is that there is no standard for sending HTML in an e-mail, nor is there one for sending RTF for that matter. SMTP - the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - is just that, simple. Trying to use HTML makes it not so simple, and causes inconsistencies.

I get plenty of messages where people have included HTML content only to discover that it doesn't display the same way for me that it does for other mail clients. (I use Mail.app, and web-based clients for other accounts.) When you're composing a message using HTML it looks good to you, but your recipient(s) may not be running the same client and the HTML could be parsed differently for them, causing the message to display differently.

The likelihood that HTML in an e-mail message may be spam also exists, causing the message to be treated with a higher level of scrutiny by anti-spam/virus scanners, and making it less likely to make it through to the recipient.

The technology is evolving too fast, and there is no standard to keep everyone in check. HTML in messages is cool, its flashy, and I sometimes use it myself for newsletters, albeit rarely. But when I do, I also provide a plain text version in the same e-mail so that people "living in the past" that don't have HTML aware clients can read it as well. Here is an example of a message that will display correctly to everyone, but it doesn't mean that I personally condone the use of HTML in SMTP:


From: The Sender <nothing.to.see@here.tld>
Subject: Some subject
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="dDRMvlgZJXvWKvBx"
To: The Recipient <you@there.tld>


--dDRMvlgZJXvWKvBx
Content-Type: text/plain

Because your mail client only displays, or because you have it set to only display plain text, this is the content you would see. The next line is the indicator that HTML is starting, and those clients wouldn't see this.

You can any HTML in the following, but know the risks and the limits, not all HTML-enabled mail clients are the same.

--dDRMvlgZJXvWKvBx
Content-Type: text/html;
charset=UTF-8

<html>
<head>
<title>no title</title>
</head>

<body>

<P>Because your mail client displays HTML, this is the content you would see. you would not see the plain section above.

You can any HTML in this section, but know the risks and the limits, not all HTML-enabled mail clients are the same.</P>

</body>
</html>

--dDRMvlgZJXvWKvBx--



[ Reply to This | # ]