What's the difference between "plain text" and "HTML" email?

Plain Text and HTML

In the beginning (so to speak) there was plain text. Quite literally, plain text is text, and only text, along with a couple of simple representations for things like end-of-line.

Plain text has no formatting. Plain text typically is represented as looking very plain. It's often displayed using what's called a "mono-spaced" font - meaning that each character takes up the same space on the line. Here's an example:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

HTML started as the way to describe how web pages should look. It includes ways to specify formatting, colors, positioning, and some amount of layout. As email became more popular, people started wanting to make their messages "look" as nice as they felt web pages looked. They wanted that formatting, the ability to put in pictures, and the like.

Let's look at our example again, this time in HTML:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

In this example I've:

• Specified a specific type-face or font

• Specified a size for the font

• indicated that the word "brown" should be bold

• indicated that the phrase "lazy dog" should be in italics

How'd I do that? Here's what the HTML encoding actually looks like:

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 12pt;">The quick <strong>brown</strong> fox jumps over the <em>lazy dog</em>.</span>

You can see that the HTML format is quite a bit larger than the plain text form. It has to be, to include all that additional formatting information.

HTML and Email

One thing that's important to know about HTML format used in email, is that not all email programs know how to interpret it. Most do, but some do not.

What does that mean? That means that if you send out your email looking like this:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Some people may see this as your message, or worse, instead:

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 12pt;">The quick <strong>brown</strong> fox jumps over the <em>lazy dog</em>.</span>

Quite the mess, right? Extremely difficult to read, right? And, in fact, some mailing list services don't handle HTML properly, which is probably why your mailing list moderator has asked you not to use it.

Choosing HTML or Plain Text

Choosing Plain Text or HTML formatting for your email can, in most email programs, be done one of two ways:

• You can set a default for all email.

• You can change the format of the current message as you compose it.

Exactly how you do this (or if you can, in fact, change the default) will vary based on what mail program you're using.

I'll show how to do both in Outlook Express as an example.

To choose which format you want Outlook Express to use by default, click the Tools menu, select Options, and click on the Send tab in the resulting dialog:

Under Mail Sending Format, select HTML or Plain Text as appropriate.

To change the current format of a message that you are composing, click on the Format menu, and then make sure that the format you want, Rich Text (HTML) or Plain Text is selected:

The appearance of your message will probably change, and if switching from HTML to Plain Text, you may get a warning that you're about to lose your formatting.

Which should you use?

Unless there's a requirement, like perhaps your mailing list, it really depends.

Warning: personal opinion ahead.

I really tend to favor plain text email. The focus should be on the message, not how "pretty" it looks. Plain text email is smaller, delivers and downloads quicker, and is also much less likely to be erroneously marked as spam.

Personally, I don't really see a need for lots of cutesy images and stationary - to me they just detract from the message. In cases where people have images blocked (which is the default for many email programs) the message actually looks worse, as the images are replaced by placeholders.

On the other hand, some people do want their email to look much richer. You'll often see a lot of businesses using HTML email to make their message look more formal, more professional, and often much more in line with their corporate image.