Should your plain text be exactly the same as your HTML?

Published January 07, 2009 by Mathew Patterson

Designers generally know that you should not send a purely HTML email, but should always provide a plain text alternative. That way, readers who can't view HTML or who prefer to view email in plain text will still be able to receive your message.

Campaign Monitor always sends in multipart HTML + plain text (or just plain text), so from a technical perspective we've got you covered. You can even get a head start by generating plain text automatically from your HTML content.

In many cases, it is very easy to provide plain text alternative. If you have a newsletter which is mostly text, then all you are really doing is tidying up formatting and removing branding. Simple plain text formatting can get you great results. Other emails though don't translate so easily.

An example that has come to our attention recently is from the Email Standards Project. We've created an email acid test that shows up rendering differences between different email clients. Now the actual readable HTML content of the email is not really relevant, it's just lorem ipsum copy and some labels.

The point of the email is to see how it renders, not to get across a message in the copy. So when we came to provide a plain text alternative, it did not seem to make sense to provide a literal equivalent of the text from the HTML version.

Instead, the plain text has totally different copy:

Hello,

Thanks for supporting the Email Standards Project. If you are reading this test version, it means your email client either is set to prefer plain text, or does not support HTML emails.

The email ACID test and Email Standards Project are really concerned with rendering of HTML in email clients, since plain text renders far more consistently. Checkout http://www.email-standards.org/acid/ to see the test in HTML format.

We will not email you at this address again, unless you have also subscribed to our email newsletter separately.

While the text is totally different, the message that we get across is exactly what is needed. However, we got quite a few complaints from people who had sent themselves a test, and were upset that the plain text was not a literal, exact equivalent to the HTML.

This shows a misunderstanding of the term 'plain text alternative'. When you send an email campaign, you have a message to get across. In HTML, that message might be best transmitted through some copy, a diagram or a screenshot. In plain text, you might need to explain the same message differently, given the constraints of the medium. Accessibility experts have been making this point for years of course.

What is a useful alternative content for a blind person might not be useful for a deaf person, or for a person using a mobile browser. Sticking rigidly to the idea of an exact translation can only lead to trouble. The best results will be achieved by taking each format and making sure it can stand on its own as a useful message.

What do you think? Is it a problem when the HTML content and the plain text are not the same?

9 Comments

Posted in: Observations & Answers

9 Comments

FJ de Kermadec
January 7, 2009 7:35pm

While I agree with your point of view from a user perspective, there is always the tricky question of SPAM filters, that may erroneously consider the email as fraudulent, should the text and HTML parts not match.

Aeons ago, when filters scanned text instead of HTML because it was just simpler, it seems SPAMmers used to send emails with relatively benign text, reserving the HTML part to carry their message.

For this reason and, probably, for many others, messages with widely different text and HTML parts used to carry a lower trust score. In fact, when I started in the wonderful world of newsletter design, we were instructed never to differentiate both parts of the mail by 5 or so percent.

Since filters have become so much smarter now, it probably no longer really matters, but I’d be curious to know whether a non-traditional email would still be penalised by filters.
Koen Mertens
January 7, 2009 8:04pm

Although I agree with some points mentioned in the article, I think it’s a good idea to at least give a good summary of the contents of the campaign.
Although I don’t have the stats to back it up, I think the clickthrough rate (for the online version) will be higher when you can trigger people with some interesting keywords or key content from the campaign…
Brett Atkin
January 7, 2009 8:26pm

I don’t see it as a problem, I think it is a necessity. They are dramatically different in terms of presentation to the end-user. I think trying to do a literal translation can make the text-version almost unreadable.
Mark Brownlow
January 7, 2009 8:28pm

On FJ’s point: last time I looked, SpamAssassin was still penalizing emails where HTML and text versions differ. See Mickey Chandler’s post for details.
Mathew Patterson
January 7, 2009 9:22pm

Some good comments, thanks. @FJ, that’s an interesting point, and would be something to watch out for.

@koen Yes, any time you can give a summary of the content, and it makes sense, you should do it. You just might need to put more thought into making it useful rather than translating directly.
Mathew Patterson
January 8, 2009 7:02am

@Mark hopefully it does not come down to getting an unhelpful exact translation or not receiving an actually useful text version!
David Greiner
January 8, 2009 7:37am

@Mark Thanks for the link, that’s a good read. I think it’s also important to remember that even if you do get penalized by SpamAssassin for the text/HTML versions differing too much, it’s very rare that on its own this will result in the email being filtered. Provided you’re not breaking too many other rules, it shouldn’t be a problem and those seeing the text version get a better experience.

Of course, we always recommend testing to get your SpamAssassin score before sending.
Jayne
January 12, 2009 12:03pm

I’ve had issues with emails with different HTML and Text content versions with several spam filters I’ve come across when testing in Litmus.
RaiulBaztepo
March 29, 2009 11:11am

Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language ;)
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo

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