A: Because
Q: When do you really need HTML formatted email?
A: When you need to send spam to advertise your porn site or your cheap happy pills, and a picture that hits you in the face saying "click here" that when clicked takes you directly to the order form. HTML is perfect for that.
For anything else you should use plain text.
Advantages of plain text emails:
- ALL email readers will read the emails correctly - even cell-phones and older computers.
- You will not annoy the geeks that hate HTML emails.
- Emphasis can be added to certain words simply by enclosing them in asterisks.1
- Underlining of phrases can easily be done by adding an underscore before and after the phrase.1
- The signature (name and contact details at bottom of email) is separated by a double-dash (--).1
- Text-only emails are smaller. Take less time and bandwidth to transport and use less disk space.
- Email will not be blocked or hidden by cautious email software. Because it is possible to hide viruses and other malware in HTML, it is quite common for the presence of HTML to be used as an indicator for heuristic spam filters and the more sophisticated email clients will not display HTML content without the user's permission.
- Font, and font size can be chosen by the recipient. People with poor eyesight or small screens may prefer larger text. With HTML the font, size and colour are chosen by the sender rather than the recipient.
- Images and specially formatted documents can be added as attachments. State in the body of the email the description of the attachments and that gives your correspondent the choice of whether to open the attachment or not.
So please, do yourself, your correspondents and the internet a favour and set your email program to create text-only emails by default.
1 Windows' default email clients may not recognise these standards, but most other email programs do.
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