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==HTML Formatted E-mail Issues==

	Why should you not send HTML formatted e-mail? After all it seems easier to read and look more professional. However, there are several reasons not to send mass or important e-mails using HTML formatting.
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	'''1. Compatibility.''' Have you ever had a file, sent it to someone, and then they couldn’t open it? Many of us have. The same issue applies to HTML formatted e-mails. Some e-mail software packages may not be able to read the HTML tags in the e-mail, and some may even do it incorrectly. While most packages can read mails sent by other e-mail software, even HTML mail, there is no guaranteed cross-platform software package.
	Now, there are ways to send your mails as both styled and plain text, but this is not always effective. How the recipient will see your mail depends upon the software packages. An e-mail written and formatted in Outlook and viewed in Pine will show the text portion as an attachment, which must be opened separately. A mail sent from Incredi-Mail, for example, will not even display properly in Outlook due to its use of special HTML tags that Outlook cannot understand. There is no guaranteed cross-platform HTML e-mail software package. These issues make sending HTML mail dangerous and unpredictable. For a mass mail or an important message to be sent to multiple users, this is probably not an acceptable risk. 

	Click [http://www.admin.mtu.edu/sas/docs/testmessage.txt here] to see an example of the text version of an HTML e-mail.
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	'''2. HTML formatted e-mail can be infectious.''' While a regular, text formatted e-mail can have a virus as an attachment, HTML e-mail can have one right in the content. Two known viruses, Bubbleboy and kak.worm, can infect computers that merely view the e-mail. This means you will not get a message from your Virus Scanner asking you if you wish to delete or clean the attachment, nor can you avoid them by simply not opening the attachment. In some cases, Microsoft Outlook in particular, just viewing the e-mail in the “Preview Pane” can infect your computer. 
	Also, mainly in Outlook, there are ways to execute malicious code using Microsoft Internet Explorer specific formatting for HTML pages. The software will usually use the default engine, which is, more often than not, Internet Explorer. Since IE (Internet Explorer) is so closely tied and integrated with the Windows OS, it leaves many doors for the offending e-mail to run hard-drive damaging scripts. 
This security breach is very dangerous, especially since a mass e-mail or an e-mail to important clients, could be unintentionally infected, spreading a virus to the computers of important individuals.
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	'''3. HTML Formatted e-mail takes up a significantly larger chunk of bandwidth than sending text formatted e-mail.''' You’re probably thinking that it “sure doesn’t seem any slower”, but that’s from the users end. The extra amount of work required to send the message is actually more than double the amount it would take to send it as text. 
	This difference in size may be nearly insignificant when sending this e-mail to one or two contacts, but when you’re sending out a large message with quite a bit of formatting to multiple clients, you are more than doubling the amount of work the your campus mail server has to do, and also more than doubling the amount of work your recipients mail server has to perform.
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	'''4. It can be slower.''' Not all computers in the world are speedy and instantly responsive. Many know that, and have experienced that, either in the past or the present. Running several programs can take the performance of even a good computer and pull it to the ground. HTML e-mail is like opening a browser, and then loading a web page. This can seriously effect the performance of your computer. Even if your computer has already opened one HTML e-mail, many of these messages can open pictures and backgrounds from a remote site.
	So you’re opening an e-mail that is at least twice as large as the text version, but now you have to load potentially large, clunky pictures from a web server that may or may not be responsive. This is putting a part of your e-mail performance in the hands of a third party, not a reasonable solution.<br><br>

	'''Remember that this paper is just to justify the reasons why we, SAS, do not approve of sending important mass or multiple-receiver e-mails in HTML format.'''
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Sources: 

http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml

http://evolt.org/article/view/25/781/index.html

http://vil.mcafee.com/dispVirus.asp?virus_k=10509

http://vil.mcafee.com/dispVirus.asp?virus_k=10418

[[Category:E-Mail]]
[[Category:Liaison Info]]
[[Category:SAS Customer Info]]