TABLE OF CONTENTS › Text vs. HTML
The most-requested feature for Postmaster [PM] has been to support HTML emails; as of version 0.2, a custom tag has been added to allow for this.
However, the research I have done and my own personal philosophy reaches this conclusion: the best way to reach your subscribers is to send a text email to them, with a link to an HTML version. Textpattern [TXP] and PM make this very easy to do.
The reason for this is that almost all email programs can “handle” text emails — basically, what you write and send will be seen and read in much the way that you want it to be seen and read. HTML emails, though, are a different matter, and some email programs read them differently than others, poorly if at all, some require different orders of mime types and some allow more or less CSS and HTML formatting.
In addition, some programs don’t allow attachments; some will send multi-part mime emails to the Spam folder; HTML emails are much weightier for your user; you can’t be sure it’s arriving in good shape; many users are distrustful of HTML emails; etc.
For all these reasons, it still makes the best sense to format a text email carefully, and use that as your notification or newsletter. Let your users decide they want to come to the Web site on their own.
With the 0.3 release, this has been made even easier. You can now write an article with Textile formatting (so that on your site it’s properly formatted in HTML) but mail it as plain text.