I HATE training the tech support person!

I complained at LinkedIn last week about one sub-set of their e-mails. Most of their e-mails have reasonably good text/plain and text/html parts - this one sub-set (which is pointers to what might be the second-most interesting stuff on the set) is pure html. AsYouKnowBob, I use mutt to read my personal e-mail, using bash over ssh. The hand-off for the html mime type is to lynx, which I haven't bothered to learn how to coerce into https & log-in required yet. So, I complained about the lack of a proper text/plain part.

My complaint got handed off to 'the group in charge of that area'. And then I got a reply of 'I don't understand what you're talking about'!

Grrr...

Here's my reply:

It is frustrating to me that someone who is apparently tasked with providing help on e-mail does not understand what multi-part e-mail is.

An e-mail is frequently composed of multiple parts - most frequently, a plain-text part and an html part, although there are other possible parts. Talk to your e-mail administrators, or look at these few results from googling "multi-part e-mail" = https://www.fiveq.com/blog/email-marketing/multi-part-vs-html-or-text-only-emails/, https://litmus.com/blog/reach-more-people-and-improve-your-spam-score-why-multi-part-email-is-important, and http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc1341/7_2_Multipart.html.

You might especially note the fact that not having a plain-text portion gets your e-mails lots of points when using the default spamassassin rules - in other words, it greatly increases the chances that your e-mail will get marked as spam.

Do you understand that whatever is generating your e-mails is generating something formatted as pure HTML? Do you understand the concept of a plain-text e-mail client?

Try saving one of the automatic e-mails your system generates to a file, and then open it in something like NotePad. THAT should be what I see when I open one of your e-mails. In a multi-part e-mail, there would be a plain-text portion that has no formatting - no bold, no italics, no HREF links - just the text and explicit http links.