Craptacular email authoring meets luddites

This is bad news for anyone crafting email campaigns, but honestly, if I read one more comment where people plaintively insist that email is only ever meant to be sent as regular text, I just might scream. Go back to breaking textile machines and accepting union-defined minimum wages, seriously. I find it so hard to believe that any of these people are able to hold down serious jobs as sysadmins when they are so completely oblivious to the requirements/desires of the people they’re employed to provide these services to.

Yes, rich (HTML/RTF/whatever this new crap Outlook 2007 is pulling is) email can be horribly messy. Yes, it is a requirement. Yes, if you think text-only is the way to go, you need to pull your head out of the sand. Welcome to the twenty-first century.

The closest I’ve come to someone who thought like that was a chap who was adamantly against the idea of content management systems. I jest not, but in my mind that’s less serious an offense than suggesting that all content on the web should consist solely of text and links, “because that’s the way it was designed”. That is, in essence, what these sysadmins (and some other open-source bigots — we should all use Mutt and Pine — who probably haven’t much experience with the creation or delivery of such things) are arguing.