views:

22

answers:

1

Emails sent with html are obviously able to easily contain hyperlinks to web resources. What I want to understand is how best to include those links in a plaintext portion of the email?

Does this have any affect on spam ?

For example, our IT management system sends out emails and occasionally we encounter a customer that is ending up with system messages in their spam.

The system handles tickets and notifies the user when they are updated or modified so they know to go back to the site to check the status of their ticket.

The HTML portion would like something like:

<html>
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    </head>
        <body>
        <div>Short description: can't see web content hosted on phoenix</div><div>Assigned to: .... </div>
        <div>Assignment Group: ...</div>
        <div>Priority: 4 - Standard</div>
        <div>Click here to view: 
            <a href="https://&lt;LINKTOTICKET&gt;"&gt;LINK&lt;/a&gt;-INC999999
        </div>
        <div>Ref:MSG951683</div>
    </body>    
</html>

And the plaintext portion would like something like:

Short description: can't see web content hosted on phoenix
Assigned to: ...
Assignment Group: ...
Priority: 4 - Standard

Click here to view: LINK-INC999999


Ref:MSG951683

In this plaintext portion what is most appropriate way to include the same hyperlink so a user can easily see this link whether they prefer email in plaintext or html ?

+1  A: 

I don't know about the spam implications, but plain text does not have hyperlinks. Some email clients will render a link on any text that starts with a URI schema (http://, https://, mailto: etc...), however you can't rely on that.

If you want people viewing plaintext to be able to use the link, you should render it on a line on its own. Then they can copy/paste into a browser if they wish to.

Oded
The problem I am having is this is a 3rd party vendor system and I am trying to come up with a recommendation for them to resolve this. At first glance it appears they are currently merely stripping html markup from the message to send the plaintext portion. Thanks for your comments, appreciated.
Chris
@Chris - relevant piece of information, don't you think? Please edit your question and add context to it. Perhaps others will be able to add more points of view, knowing this context.
Oded
I think it makes the question too specific because there are situations where I would be implementing email functionality and want to know as well. The question I want answered is what I have asked, I was just giving more context based on your answer.
Chris