HTML email vs ASCII email: a comparison

For over ten years I've written an email newsletter about customer experience, and "good experience" in general, for thousands of readers. And until last week, I created every single newsletter in plain ASCII text.

I switched the newsletter to HTML last week and got a lot of reader responses, which gave me a bird's-eye view of the user experience of email newsletters, both in plaintext and HTML.

Overall, I'm happy with the decision to switch to HTML, but there are still reasons to argue for the ASCII format. Here's what I've learned over the years, and last week, about email format:

Why ASCII is good

ASCII is the simplest possible format for an email. This delivers several benefits:

• Philosophical purity: any enlightened user understands the value of using the simplest tool for the job. And in the digital world, it doesn't get any simpler than ASCII. It resists all fads, bucks all trends, confounds all efforts to complicate and obfuscate. Bits become words with perfect purity and clarity, with no company or standard or license mediating or toll-collecting or gate-keeping in the middle.

• Compatibility with every device, every platform, every operating system on earth: everything understands ASCII. No need to upgrade to a different version, or tweak the code to adhere to proprietary standards. ASCII works, exactly right, every time.

• WYSIWYG: What you see is what you get with ASCII. If I write "hello world," then "hello world" is displayed on every computer, phone, and other devices that receives that text. And by wrapping (inserting a carriage return) at a certain width - I like 68 characters - one can control the margins and layout of the entire document.

• Clean, virus-free content: ASCII is open and transparent about its contents. There's no way to hide malicious code in the body of an ASCII email, like one can do in an HTML email. ASCII is your guileless friend who may not be flashy or trendy, but is totally reliable and honest. (Which type of person do you prefer to hang out with?)

• Smaller file size, and thus shorter load time, than what one would get with HTML.

• A message to the universe: As one newsletter reader put it, an ASCII email makes a statement in its very look. Quoting his email...

I'll admit that the HTML newsletter looks prettier, but I still find the old-fashioned Courier typeface easier to read. There's something sturdy and sensible about a fixed-pitch font like Courier. To me, it has always meant, "What you are now reading is so true and so important that we don't even care that our art director thinks it's boring."

However...

Why ASCII isn't so good

With all the above benefits in mind, there are some real drawbacks to ASCII.

• ASCII looks crappy in Outlook. Microsoft Outlook, arguably the most popular email program in the world (and likely to stay that way for a long time), displays ASCII email in what has to be the ugliest font in its library. It just looks hideous. Over the years I've occasionally gotten emails from newsletter readers saying something like, "Why do you have to send your newsletter in such a gross font?" At first I thought this was strange, since ASCII has no font - it's just letters, nothing else - but I've come to realize that these were Outlook users who are stuck with the default way that Outlook displays ASCII. The crazy thing is that Microsoft could fix this problem with a single line of code: just changing the default to show ASCII in a perfectly pleasant and readable font, like Apple Mail and Gmail do.

• ASCII hyperlinks don't work well in Outlook. If you happen to type a space character after a URL, Outlook may not make that link clickable. (Or it's clickable, but Outlook adds a %20 at the end of the URL which breaks it.) I haven't tested fully to see what all the conditions are for this to happen, but I do know that Outlook is lacking some important, and totally basic, functions for interpreting URLs in ASCII.

• Wrapped ASCII can look strange on the iPhone. If you wrap an ASCII message at, say, 65 or 68 characters, the iPhone's email program (if held in portrait mode) can only fit 40-or-so characters across the width of its screen.

That leaves the iPhone showing lines that tend to
wrap strangely, like this,
and then are followed by much longer lines like this.

This isn't a bug in the iPhone - it's just displaying the text as it was created - but it's something worth noting. Unwrapped text looks better on the iPhone. (On the plus side, the iPhone shows ASCII in a pleasant-looking font.)

In short, Microsoft Outlook is the bane of ASCII email's existence. A conspiracy-minded theorist might suggest that Microsoft intentionally neglects to handle ASCII well, so as to nudge people toward using Microsoft-owned protocols, standards, and technologies to create their emails. But I think basic carelessness is more likely the cause.

Whatever the root cause, Outlook is just really, constantly, consistently annoying. I even took a photo. This is me shouting, "Outloooooooook!"

(Click the graphic to hear me shout.)

Now for the light at the end of the tunnel.

Why HTML is good

After I sent the HTML newsletter, I heard from many readers - a clear majority of the feedback - that they preferred the new format. My conclusion was that HTML provides a better reader experience, and thus is by definition a better format for the newsletter - which is, after all, named Good Experience.

Here's why they said they liked the HTML:

• The font is prettier/easier to read/more professional looking. I'd guess that most of these folks are Outlook users (since, as I said, Apple Mail and the iPhone and Gmail all display ASCII emails in a nice-looking font) - but, like it or not, Outlook is the email program for a huge percentage of the world.

• Links are easier to see, since they're blue and underlined - and as an extra bonus, they don't break in Outlook like some ASCII URLs do, as described above.

• You can display images, something that by definition is unavailable in ASCII.

• If you keep the HTML simple, the formatting - headers, bold text, etc. - make the message easier to scan. The caveat here is keep it simple - in other words, adhere to the principles that made ASCII great for so long. The deadly drawback of HTML is that it's so easy, and so tempting for some, to complicate the design and go overboard with features - which, according to my readers, most other newsletters tend to do.

• If you keep the HTML simple, Outlook can display it: I'm sorry to hammer on this point, but Outlook - much like its companion Web browser, Internet Explorer - can't reliably display HTML correctly unless it's extremely basic in structure. This limits the amount you can do - in my own newsletter, Outlook had trouble displaying text to the right of an image, something every other mail client seemed to handle fine - but this may be a blessing as it forces you to keep the design simple.

• A small point, but you can put a logo in the message. Interestingly enough, last week was the first time I've ever gotten comments on the Good Experience logo, which I like quite a bit, even though it's been up on the site for several months.

Why HTML is not so good

Although I think the benefits outweigh them, it's worth acknowledging the drawbacks of HTML.

• It takes a lot longer to create. I could whip up an ASCII newsletter in a few minutes... but the HTML version takes more time and effort, given that I'm manually adding the tags and hyperlink definitions. Some services (like Campaign Monitor, which I use) offer a WYSIWYG editor for HTML mails, but you give up some control of formatting - which I need to have for Good Experience. But even with the editor it's still slower than zipping along with a plaintext format.

• The iPhone displays most HTML email in miniscule text, forcing users to zoom in and then scroll right to read to the end of the line. Anyone sending HTML email should know how to get around that, and I'm surprised how few newsletters out there do it right. With a little research I've found it's not hard to make the code changes - for example, define all the tables with width 100%.

• HTML allows the publisher to collect ever more information about users that the users aren't aware is being collected. Within Good Experience I can see who opened each email and which link any given person clicked on - which is a nice feature for me, I'm not complaining - but I am aware that this is part of a larger societal trend toward companies collecting, tracking, and analyzing more about customers than the customers know. I have mixed feelings about even having this new ability, let alone using it. Privacy, security, and over-sharing are much bigger topics for another column, but I thought I'd bookmark them here.

Conclusion

My conclusion is, forget everything I've just said. In the end it's really not the format of the newsletter that matters. Instead, a good experience depends on the content more than the format of the content. With that in mind, I'll close on my favorite bit of feedback from last week... it's from the same reader I quoted above. Here's how he ended his note:

The new typeface seems to have not as much weight (i.e., the lines that comprise each character are not as thick as Courier), and the kerning (space between the characters) is a little too tight for my taste. In short, I'm squinting a bit to read it.

But I enjoy your newsletter so much that I'd read it even if you changed the font to Wingdings.

You can try it out for yourself: sign up for the Good Experience email newsletter.

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See also: Graph of the mail clients reading the newsletter (on first pass, appears that Apple software is most popular)

• Mar 16, 2010
• IN: Customer Experience
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