Ask HN: Plain text emails in 2017?

Personally, I agree emails should be sent in two versions. However, there's a trend of sending just HTML. This article was written some time ago https://litmus.com/blog/best-practices-for-plain-text-emails... and latest comments will also promote the idea of dumping plain text.

Regarding marketing emails, I mean every automated email sequence. Like, you definitely get receipts and stuff over email. And those aren't written by hand.

> Yes, you do need to send plain versions. I make my e-mail clients to use plain text version first, and if that's not available, HTML version dumbed down to plain text.

So if OP sends an HTML mail, you will be able to read it anyway, proving that they don't need to send plain text at all :)

I agree with the suggestion that you analyze how much of your sales are to customers who prefer plain text and assess whether it covers the cost of maintaining it. However, the numbers might not tell the whole story because some people deliberately block or ignore html mail even though they could figure out how to read it if they really wanted to. You probably don't monitor the replies to your marketing emails so you'll miss the replies requesting plain text format. (Nobody's going to look through your html code in their plain text mail reader to look for the url they have to copy and paste into a browser to access your web app that lets them change their email preferences to read your future marketing emails. They probably consider their time at least as valuable as yours.)

Well, I agree here. However, it's pretty hard to include click tracking into plain text emails. So it may be complicating attributing revenue to those. The way out here would be utms or stuff like bit.ly