Is it sensible to send HTML-only email these days?

I want my web app to send certain mails as HTML in order to include product images.

I could of course provide a text/plain alternative as well, but is it worth the effort in this day and age? Are there common mail clients that don't support text/html, do many people turn it o开发者_JAVA技巧ff for some good reason (I suppose spam, bandwidth), are there other reasons such as decreasing the risk of being classified as spam?

I can theorize, but would be interested to hear if someone has statistics, experience or other insight to support or speak against going text/html only.

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You are best to send both because:

• It helps reduce your spam score, even more so if your text version has the same text and links as your HTML version. This is especially true on Outlook, where no text version almost guarantees it will go the Junk folder.
• A lot of people do request a text version on the client-side. Some old Blackberries default to this setting, and Windows Mobile <= v5.

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Provide both. HTML in email has a slew of security problems, so those that are security-minded tend to disable HTML email in favor of plain text. Also, reply quoting conventions are fairly well-establised for text/plain data and not for HTML, making meaningful discussions in pure-HTML mail threads ugly.

Since you do have control over the content of the message, please make the plain text version readable. Some MUAs tend to auto-create the text/plain part, and do a horrible job in doing so. So if your messages are intended for customers, make sure the text/plain part is formatted nicely so you do not alienate them.

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I believe clients such as iOS mail use the text/plain version to preview the first couple of lines before the user opens the mail.

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I think HTML only is OK, but it should be legible without images downloaded. Outlook and Gmail both block images by default to stop tracking and viruses.

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You should always have a text/plain alternative. I don't have statistics, but I'm sure that a lot of people disable HTML emails. Including me, because I'm annoyed by all those product images and meaningless fancy newsletters.

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Stats I found were that 90% of emails were viewed in html-capable email viewers. If you choose not to include an option for plain text, you could be losing out on 10% of your audience. On the other hand, a well designed html email could more than outperform the 10% loss, so it might be worth the trade off.

I am struggling to get both working on PHP with Hostgator, so I think I'm going to focus on the low hanging fruit (the 90% who view html emails) and not worry about the 10%. Like IE 7, there comes a point where you can no longer support all platforms.

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Google does HTML email by default, this includes Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Educations. Thus millions of Gmail users send and receive HTML email rather than plain text email. Not sure whether there are any better stats than that out there.