TECH Signal 402
Stop Sending Me Your Errors
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Illustration only Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash
An article argues against the practice of putting error messages or raw HTML in the text/plain part of multipart/alternative emails, advocating instead for omitting the plain text part entirely if a proper alternative cannot be generated.
Engineers building email systems who insert placeholder errors or raw HTML into the text/plain MIME part are violating the RFC specification and frustrating users who prefer plain text, which can also trigger spam filters.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
The multipart/alternative MIME type is intended to present the same information in different formats, not to display error messages or raw HTML.
Inserting error messages into the text/plain part hinders users who configure their clients to prefer plain text or cannot render HTML.
The recommended solution is to omit the text/plain part entirely if a valid plain text version cannot be generated, which may also improve deliverability.
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