SMTP needs to be re-designed.

I don’t agree that emails should be plain text. It depends on your product, your target market, and the industry you are catering for.

I create e-newsletters for clients every day. Most of these are for the fashion, creative and entertainment industries. The client on Lotus is a major makeup company who’s target market is young, hip 15-30 year olds.

I can guarantee that if we sent plain text emails my client would have a conversion rate of zero.
This target market has a short attention span, were brought up on technology and need sizzle to impress. Without images to accompany the textual content the newsletter campaign would miserably fail.

Learning about the weaknesses of the various email clients and adopting techniques (using mixed-mode HTML4 as well as css-styled code) to fight your way around them plus providing a viewing alternative, and plain text version within the code is the best way we have found at dealing with non-confirming browsers.

Stating that all email should be plain text displays a large amount of ignorance over the purpose and reasons for why users may subscribe to the email in the first place.

Link to a html page with all your html/css/images crap and stop complaining. Sending massive big fat html emails to thousands of recipients is a waste of disk space and bandwidth.

Unfortunately - though I am a bit more knowledgeable I am still in need of a solution. Subscribed readers using Lotus Notes want HTML emails that look good and contain the content they have requested to receive. They don’t have the know how or ability to change the temperature settings on the microwave let alone talk to a tech guy about Domino.

Lotus Notes provides no affordable or convenient way to test HTML emails in their environment and I can’t seem to find a solution. Can’t we do any better?

Once AGAIN an MS upgrade breaks things that used to work. Evidently Billy G. never heard of backward compatibility.

And Lotus’ programmers have never heard of the HTML 3.2 spec, it seems… I’d say that’s more of a worry. Outlook 2007 can still be worked around easily. Notes and Domino are the unholy union that destroys HTML designers’ souls.

I once went nuts and adressed an email to IBM support with the ten first flaws i could remind of (like the inability to cancel more than 1 type back…)

Regarding the HTML topic, my e-mails look so 1999. Can’t set table borders, images, CSS and so on… An HTML copy-paste in an e-mail takes ages even for a few lines and freezes the app (maybe it’s our admin who sucks but c’mon, how is that possible ?). Shame on these guys.