Benefits of using plain text email

If you have ever received an email from us you may have noticed that it was sent as a plain text email without any fancy fonts or colours and without embedded sound or graphics. There are a number of benefits to be gained by using plain text over HTML or Richtext, some of them are outlined here:

It's smaller and therefore faster

Plain text email is pretty much that - plain text. There are no embedded tags or codes to be sent, nothing beyond the most basic formatting, no colours or background pictures. This means the email is smaller and therefore needs less time to send or receive.

It's more compatible

These days more and more people read email when out of the office, often using a Blackberry or similar device. By using plain text you can guarantee that your message will be readable (No guarantee that it will actually be read however...). HTML/Richtext emails can contain formatting that renders them unreadable on some platforms. Another benefit of being smaller is that that mobile users need less bandwidth and battery power to download your email.

It's more secure

You cannot get a virus from reading a plain text email, nor can the sender track the email to see who has opened it. The former is often used to try and install keyloggers onto systems, the latter is commonly used by companies to ascertain who should stay on their marketing databases.

Here at IT Lifeguard we send virtually all email in plain text, the exception being when we are forwarding HTML formatted mail that contains embedded images - maybe a couple of times a year. We also read all email in plain text as well, primarily for the security aspect of doing so. Most of us will have received the 'Please log in using your username and password' emails that seem to be circulating all the time. They might be asking you to log into your bank, your PayPal account or even your Facebook account - I have received 4 of these recently and I don't even have a Facebook account! Here is one of them as it was sent out (In HTML format).

However, in plain text it looks like this:

It is immediately apparent that the hyperlinks in the email do not point to Facebook's servers but to a website named hyrrefl.me.uk which was set up by the scammer specifically for the purpose of gathering information - bear in mind that some people use the same login information for different websites so Facebook details might also be bank details. You can see that the email was sent on 3rd November, from the image below you can see that the domain was registered on 2nd November. Registering a domain name is cheap so the scammer must have been confident that the returns to be made would outweigh the nominal cost of setting the scam up.

Another common one is the 'Notice of underreported income' phishing attempt. This is seen worldwide despite the fact that the IRS is an American body, in the UK it would be the Inland Revenue - and I'm pretty certain that they wouldn't send mails addressing you by your Christain name only!

In HTML:

In plaintext:

Is that ssazxa1.eu? Doesn't look like an official site to me, let's see when it was registered...

...well today is 26th November 2009 (At the time of page creation) and the website was registered yesterday. The domain status of QUARANTINE indicates that it has already been deleted, a list of domain statuses can be found here

Incidentally, you can see from the screenshots above that reading email in plaintext does not mean you cannot view it in HTML, it's a couple of mouseclicks to change the format of an individual message and probably not more than half a dozen to reset the default format either way.

In summary, plain text email is smaller, faster, simpler & safer! We are not the only company to think this, here are a few other articles that may include things that we have missed:

http://mail-list.com/list_owner/plain_text_email.html

http://antivirus.about.com/od/securitytips/a/plainttextemail.htm

http://www.arrowmail.co.uk/articles/htmlmail.aspx