[thelist] Receving HTML email

[Andrew Gianni]

I'm actually a fan of well formatted HTML email. That said, I've rarely seen
HTML email that I like :) My organization actually sends out a monthly email
newsletter that's HTML formatted and when we made the change we got a lot of
very good responses and only two complaints. I think the key is that the
layout is very simple and just uses tables to outline  and format the
message. The newsletters we send out essentially look like this:

http://www.onenw.org/bin/page.cfm?pageid=335

but it's just the content in the middle and it has a boarder similar to the
outside border of the page. We're a non-profit, but the main target of this
newsletter is corporate and we've gotten hardly any flack for it. I like
HTML email that is formatted similar to the Web, but I hate HTML email that
actually looks like a Web page.

In terms of people's ability to read HTML email, I believe current version
of Pine even reads HTML email now and has for a couple of years (albeit
limited to displaying text based HTML only). Most can even deal with forms,
so you could potentially have a search form or email signup form in your
sig.

Finally, remember that you do have the potential capacity to let people
choose if they want to receive HTML email or not. Forcefeeding the customer
what you think is the best solution is generally not the best way to meet
their needs.

Andrew

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Galvin" <mgalvin at sourcevisualthinking.ie>
To: "theList" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2002 2:38 AM
Subject: [thelist] Receving HTML email


> Disregarding for the moment the fact that most people don't like
> HTML-formatted email, what is actually stopping a company from sending out
> an HTML email to a select bunch of people?  I assume there are some email
> apps that just can't read HTML (pine?) and those that can have the option
to
> turn it off (although, for the life of me, I can't find such an option in
> OE).
>
> If this is the case, is there any 'official' figures on what email apps
are
> being used out there?  I'm just trying to get a general idea of how many
> people will be unable to see the HTML version if it's sent out.  Most of
my
> client's customers are accounting contractors and consultants so they
would
> probably be fairly net savvy, but not overly so.
>
> Is there anything else I should be concerned about?  Sorry if this old
> ground being retread.
>
> --
> Michael Galvin
> source visual thinking
>
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