Email marketing offers two email formats: plain text and rich format ("HTML"); the format to choose isn't always clear. This tutorial will examine the technical limitations and advantages of these two formats. Ultimately, you should take into consideration the demographics of the group to whom you market your products or services. Equipped with the knowledge gained from this tutorial, settling for an email format will become easier.
Email was originally designed to work with text only (no images, font colors or sizes); with time, email programs and webmail services have adopted "MIME", which allows embedding into emails binary data (like images); today, the majority of email services and applications support rich emails. In spite of the wide support for rich format emails, plain text emails still abound, for the reasons outlined below.
Plain text emails travel and download much faster, since they contain virtually no "meta data" outside the email headers: meta data describes how the information should be presented, and plain text emails contain little formatting information aside from new lines characters. In