[thelist] HTML vs. Plain Text ASP's Send(e)mail

Rob Smith rob.smith at THERMON.com
Mon Nov 17 11:02:15 CST 2003


Hi list,

I've got a pretty complex form intended for our Asian audience. Because
there is a potential of having Korean, Chinese, or Japanese characters in
that form. The "notification" e-mails are sent in HTML (e-mail). However the
recipient of those e-mails takes plain text. Any non-Latin characters are
translated into question (?) marks. Hence, the original request is lost.

Additionally, all the HTML formatting and organization of data is lost. I
know that by default, as a web developer, you should always design for plain
text e-mail correspondence for this exact reason. What I'd like to do is
keep my HTML formatted e-mail's for those people who can view those types of
e-mails, but also be able to improve the plain text version as well. 

What would you do? I'm leaning towards my intuition and making a duplicate
plain text version of this e-mail. But is there anyway to detect the
recipients e-mail receiving preference (HTML or Plain Text)? Then if it's
Plain Text, present a caveat that non-Latin characters will be lost.

Rob.Smith


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