HTML / Text only e-mails

[listerr]

Had a couple of moans about HTML only e-mails (for new user registrations etc)..

Is there a way to do text/plain only or have a text alternative?

[barryo]

Sigh. This is 2013, not 1993. Seriously, if people have an issue with HTML only email, then they're better off dropping off the internet.

For a non-flippant response - yes, it's possible and I did it at the start but gave up as it was too much work maintaining a text and HTML version of the same email.

HTML offers more features and nicer formatting. The stock HTML emails are simple HTML with no fancy formatting.

This is not something that should exercise anyone to the degree that it can be considered a real problem (in, you know, 2013).

[listerr]

Yes, understood.

Geeks don't like it in our experience.

It's not the HTML that is probably the issue, but that it's HTML only

Many geeks connected here use a terminal based mail client like mutt
(or, spit pine!) as their mail client, it will fire up elinks or lynx
or some other HTML -> text browser and this is assuming it's configured and
working. Which is a bit sucky.

Two users say they can't seem to render it properly:

your html e-mail doesn't render as html btw
I see it as text (source)
no proper mime encoding

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

And/or classify it as spam to their lists, or won't open html only
messages for security reasons.

Rob

Rob Lister
rob@lonap.net
LONAP Ltd

[nickhilliard]

html vs plaintext is a religious issue. Best to support both.

Is there anything which can strip out tags from html source? That might be a relatively easy way of maintaining a single canonical version.

[portfast]

The traditional way is to pipe it through lynx.

[listerr]

Another comment received:

Subject: new portal
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2013 23:57:33 +0100
To: support at lonap.net
From: Brandon Butterworth

New portal idea is great but html only email is
a bit silly, be good to do it properly so spam
filters don't eat them

ta
brandon

[barryo]

Rob - Implemented - see:

https://github.com/opensolutions/OSS-Framework/wiki/OSS_Controller_Trait_Auth

This is live on LONAP with the default of both. To limit to plaintext only, uncomment and set line 141 of application/config/application.ini to plaintext.