Does tab character render correctly in email signature - email

I want to create a plain text email signature, and use tab to align my columns. Can I guarantee it will be correctly displayed on all email clients?
Is there a better way to achieve what I want - which is a very simple two column email signature where the columns are left aligned, and it looks exactly the same on all email clients?

No. This is not possible in plain text.
Best practice in plain text is to use spaces for aligning. This only works on monospace fonts. Use HTML tables and HTML formatting of your email if you want to have control over rendering. This is supported by all major email clients.

Related

How do I avoid HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_16 for text based logos in an email?

I'm trying to create an email template with the logo at the top however the logo is entirely text based, with a custom layout and font. Something like this: http://3cd.co/image/3M2V2X2q1T0n
It's getting 1 point in SpamAssassin due to the rule HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_16. From what I understand, this rule is designed to prevent the display of text in an image to avoid certain rules in spam filters. Is there a way to avoid this to prevent these emails from going directly to spam? I'd like to display the branding in their font and style, and it seems the only alternative I can figure out is just by using plain text for the company name. Any suggestions on avoiding this rule?
The only way to get around it is to add more text words to your emails until you have more than 1600 bytes of words. How to calculate: copy/paste your entire email into something like notepad that will drop all the formatting, html tags (if you're using an html emailer), images, etc and just give you the body of the email. Save the file, check out it's size and make sure it's larger than 1600 bytes.
BTW, you may want to go ahead and have more than 3200 bytes of text while you're at it, or you'll just hit the next rules on your way up (2000, 2400, 2800, 3200). Depending on your config those rules may penalize your email less, but why not go ahead and kill it while you're at it?
I suggest you to copy and paste legal texts, privacy notices, etc. into your signature footer, to increase the percentage of text versus images.
Still one drawback, and that is that when replying or forwarding the email, it becomes uncomfortably large. And more if the same email is exchanged several times.

E-mail like rich text input

How do I implement an e-mail like text area input? Where the users can upload images, format text, etc.
Like when you ask a question here, it gives you option to format text, input HTML or add images.
You will probably want to use one of the many freely available WYSIWYG editors.
A couple of the more popular ones are:
CKEditor: http://ckeditor.com/
TinyMCE: http://www.tinymce.com/
You can explore alternatives using AlternativeTo.
If your users are more technical, they may prefer a Markdown syntax.

Multipart email best practices

I am developing a web app that sends out emails. Currently, all emails have a HTML part.
Questions:
Is it important to include a text part also?
Do you include both?
Is just removing all the tags from the HTML message and adding a few line breaks good enough to create a text part from the HTML part?
Thanks, Kevin
Is it Important to include a text part also? It's a best practice to provide a plain text version of the email. However, in my opinion and in this day and age, I would guess that it is not such a big deal to leave it out. However, if you know more about your recipients' email clients (eg: if you're sending the emails in a corporate environment and everyone uses a particular email client), then you can determine how necessary it really is.
Do you include both? The .net framework (which I use) provides an AlternateView class (MSDN) that allows you to easily specify copies of an email in different formats. It makes things very easy to include a plain text version of the email. Perhaps you can find something similar in apache/php.
Is just removing all the tags from the HTML message and adding a few line breaks good enough to create a text part from the HTML part? Technically, yes but be VERY CAREFUL here. A complex HTML layout that has been converted to plain text will look absolutely terrible if all you do is remove HTML tags and pile the content together. It really depends on your content and how much you can do to manipulate said content. Also, take a look at Campaign Monitor'ssuggestions for formatting plain text emails.
One final word of advice for you HTML emails to test, test, and then test some more. When you're finished testing, test again. HTML emails will render differently in different email clients and, if some of your recipients are using Microsoft Word 2007/2010 then you can forget about web standards. I urge you to take a look at Campaign Monitor's Guide to CSS support in email.

RichText Email on Blackberry

We are currently sending our emails as HTML but it is not rendering properly on the blackberry. It add's extra blank lines. I assume that is because of the tag. Anyways when sending them as plain text they render correctly, but now the user wants some of the keywords to be bolded. Would rich text format be viable? Should it render properly in the blackberry and if so what would be the syntax for a new line \n.
Note: The HTML emails render correctly in Outlook.
We have had pretty good experiences with html mails on BB 4.5 and up (although not perfect). Try using paragraph tags instead of the new line character.
But you may need to fiddle around a bit with the email format to get it looking great.

Right-to-Left Email

I'm trying to generate email from my code that will read correctly for people using right-to-left-reading languages such as Arabic. My question is: what are my options for acheiving this?
I am aware that I can create a multipart email and encode the message body as "text/html", then specify a text direction in the <html> tag (e.g. <html dir="rtl">), but ideally I would like use plain-text email and not have to rely on HTML formatting, because not all users will have HTML support in their email client.
On the plain-text front, I have managed to encode Arabic text in UTF-8 using the "Content-Type" header as follows:
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=UTF-8
But as for the overall direction of the text, I am unsure how to explicitly specify this in the email, or even if this is necessary. How would an Arabic speaker typically work with plain-text email? Would they usually rely on the global text direction setting in their email client, or is there some other, generally accepted way of forcing the text direction in the email itself?
Any suggestions or general advice regarding right-to-left email would be much appreciated.
I am unsure how to explicitly specify this in the email, or even if this is necessary.
For plain-text unicode, you can add a right-to left mark inline, but it's not really needed.
I'd say why not add the RTL mark, but it's not really necessary
How would an Arabic speaker typically work with plain-text email?Would they usually rely on the global text direction setting in their email client, or is there some other, generally accepted way of forcing the text direction in the email itself?
Most users would be able to either switch the text direction to get a correct padding of the lines, or are used to a jagged-right Arabic text (the text itself will appear correctly if it doesn't contain any inline English characters, and users are used to reading it in chunks even if it does).
I am upvoting Osama's question, even tough I have a very different opinion then him. The reason is that unicode control characters are not used enough in the world, and they could fix a lot of problems.
Anyway, to my answer: use HTML. Really. Because even if you so s = RLE + s + PDF, the text will have right-to-left direction but not alignment.