Today's winner of the "Pet Peeve of the Day Award" goes to all email newsletters which repeatedly and spontaneously (at least to the recipient) stop arriving in plain text format and begin to arrive in HTML format, even though the subscriber has previously chosen plain text instead of HTML formatted email!
Compounding the irritation is the fact that the "plain text" option still exists, but it can be quite a challenge to reset the subscription back to plain text due to confusing web pages or the requirement to dig up an old username/password combination.
Just a quick reminder to anyone in e-marketing who cares to reach their potential clients: many companies disable HTML rendering (particularly image retrieval) in their email clients, and, believe it or not, many companies do not use Microsoft Exchange. Oh yeah, one other thing - many companies also place tight quotas on user mailbox size -- by switching to HTML, one newsletter's message size went from approximately 10 kB to approximately 80 kB, which makes it that much more likely to be deleted quickly.
Maybe I'm over-reacting, but as of today, I am cancelling all of my Bio-IT World email newsletter subscriptions. Given my responsibilities and my budget, I can't imagine that this was the outcome that they were looking for, but given my responsibilities and my budget, I am simply tired of continually having to reset a preference which I have never changed!
PS. I don't intend to pick on Bio-IT World. They are actually quite a good publication, and I know some of the staff pretty well. Bio-IT World is merely the latest culprit. Many publications are guilty of the same offense, but all of them really should know better than to do this to their customers.
PPS. Please, no advice on choosing a new email client. It's not going to happen anytime soon.
Update: I just remembered an interesting article about newsletter usability by Jakob Nielsen. If you are in the business of sending out email newsletters, it is worth reading.
