The proliferation of unreadable e-mail
I’m getting more and more unreadable e-mails.
About a month ago I noted that WordPress’s response forms, which used to be a useful feature, are now unreadable and unusable.
More and more people seem to be sending e-mails with little more than long URLs that take up several lines of text, and make the actual message, if any, very hard to read, and have to be copied and pasted into a web browser because they haven’t bothered to enclose them in angle brackets. Don’t they know that Tiny URL is free? — please use it.
And then more and more people, especially church organisations and banks and the like, are sending HTML-only messages that are not only very hard to read, but also contain Lazy HTML, which prompts my mail reader to display the following warning:
What’s more, these messages are usually sent from a no-reply e-mail address, so you can’t even ask for clarification.
Whenever that warning pops up, I usually delete the message unread.
If they really wanted me to read the message, they would not have:
- Disguised it to make it look like spam or malware
- Deliberately made it hard to read
- Made it “no-reply” so you can’t ask for clarification
So if you are sending e-mails, please remember some courtesy rules:
- No Lazy HTML
- No HTML-only messages
- No long URLS
To which I might add “No Comic Sans”, except that if you feel an irresistible compulsion to use HTML in e-mails, Comic Sans is a lot more readable than some of the squitty and faint fonts that some commercial firms feel compelled to use.
Notes from underground 
I must be lucky I haven’t received the types of email that you mention.