Building Your Business

There are a wide variety of message formats and each format has particular strengths and weaknesses that are important to understand. Selecting the wrong message type for your audience may result in your message being discarded as potential spam before it even reaches them. There is no one format of message that is best - it all depends on who you are sending to and what you want to present.

Common message formats are:

• plain text - don't under rate this one. It can be very effective in terms of getting to your intended readers but you won't have the open tracking information that is available with other formats.


• html - lots of options with html to do anything you want with results ranging from highly effective presentations to some absolutely hideous messages with flashing bold colors screaming at you.


• MIME - a combination of text and html that enables the email client to select the message format desired. This is the most common type of email format.


• image only messages - one giant image or sliced into seamless pieces. Image only messages can look fantastic, with the added advantage that they will look the same for everyone, but there can be delivery issues


• messages with attachments - the plus is that the document is right there with the email but attachments can deliver unwanted virus payloads or cause delivery issues if they are too large.

When choosing your message format you need to consider your message and who will be reading it. If they are likely to have older computers with very strict spam filter rules perhaps text is best. If the presentation of the message is very important or if perhaps your message contains potential spam trigger words, perhaps an image only message will be most effective. But for most cases a MIME message that includes both text and html will be the format of choice.

Tomorrow I'll write about some of the issues with html. Neatness does count.

Labels: message formats