May 2007 Archives

There's a good chance I'm going to get branded as a techie-luddite (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one) for the recommendation I'm about to make.

I believe that 90% of your outgoing email should be in plain text format. Maybe more.

Why?

Aside from a collection of technical reasons I'll get to in a minute, it's simple really: you want people to focus on what you have to say, not how it looks. Lots of formatting, backgrounds, highlighting and using many different fonts and styles are all things that distract from your words. They're more about making your message "pretty" to look at, and rarely add value to your ideas.

I'm not saying never use HTML (or Rich Text) email, but I am saying default to using plain text and only use HTML email when you really need to, which is actually pretty rare.