Since the introduction of HTML email (must have been before my first email encounter), and especially now that internet speeds have gone up and computers are fast enough to render email in HTML, email has been HTML.
Since I switched to only looking at the plain text version of multipart/alternative emails, I see that HTML has become the default for many corporate emails.
I see HTML entities: © and for which there are Unicode code points and UTF-8 representations.
I see:
Click here for more.
… without any URL that my email client could make clickable.
I see the opposite:
I see CSS, with hacks:
/* Client-specific Styles */
#outlook a{padding:0;} /* Force Outlook to provide a "view in browser" button. */
body{width:100% !important;} .ReadMsgBody{width:100%;} .ExternalClass{width:100%;} /* Force Hotmail to display emails at full width */
body{-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;} /* Prevent Webkit platforms from changing default text sizes. */
/* Reset Styles */
body{margin:0; padding:0;}
img{border:0; height:auto; line-height:100%; outline:none; text-decoration:none;}
table td{border-collapse:collapse;}
#backgroundTable{height:100% !important; margin:0; padding:0; width:100% !important;}
p {margin-top: 14px; margin-bottom: 14px;}
/* ////////// STANDARD STYLING: PREHEADER ////////// */
.preheaderContent div a:link, .preheaderContent div a:visited, /* Yahoo! Mail Override */ .preheaderContent div a .yshortcuts /* Yahoo! Mail Override */{
color: #3b6e8f;
font-weight:normal;
text-decoration:underline;
}
.mainContent a:link, a:visited{
color:#336699;
}
/* ////////// STANDARD STYLING: FOOTER LINKS ////////// */
.footerContent div a:link, .footerContent div a:visited, /* Yahoo! Mail Override */ .footerContent div a .yshortcuts /* Yahoo! Mail Override */{
/*@editable*/ color:#336699;
/*@editable*/ font-weight:normal;
/*@editable*/ text-decoration:underline;
}
And I see HTML:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head><title>Uw bestelling bij Ticketscript</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<table width="468">Beste Ben Companjen,
Come on, corporations, I am in business with you (these emails are results of me being a client of corporations’ services)! Please put some effort in serving your plain text email readers.