Text vs html emails

Question

Our site generates several emails per day, a lot of which can contain awkward links, such as http://company/process/task?id=1234-4123-2352-1234&user=xyz...

Consequently I have been sending text only emails, on the suspicion that they will be treated more 'fairly' by email filters along the way. I cannot afford to lose emails to clients.

Lately I have been wanting to add more content to the outbound email. This is causing problems, as text-only emails start looking really ugly, really quickly when content builds up.

My question is simple... Do I face any risk moving to HTML based emails, especially if I generate awkward links that are then 'hidden' under cleaner looking href links?

Answer 1

You should use multipart/alternative emails to send HTML and Text in the same email. In order to make sure you get treated fairly by SPAM filters, make sure the text content of the two formats is nearly identical.

Some links to get you started

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME
• http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2046#section-5.1.4

If you have any questions about this feel free to comment on this answer and I will give more detailed answers as soon as time allows