When are plain text emails needed and which devices still use them?

Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum responds that people using older mobile devices or those with very basic email applications may only be able to properly read plain text emails. This ensures they can access your content.

Email marketer from EmailOctopus Blog shares that plain text emails are essential for accessibility. Some recipients may have visual impairments or use screen readers, which can better process plain text emails. It ensures a more inclusive experience for all subscribers.

Email marketer from Quora User 'TechGuru' explains that it is much easier for machines to read and parse a plain text email, therefore making them useful for automated tasks.

Email marketer from Email Geeks shares that plain text emails are needed for alerts/reports when using email2sms gateways.

Email marketer from StackOverflow user 'SimpleEmail' answers that plain text is easier to parse programmatically when you need to extract data from emails using scripts or automated tools. This is common for processing data from incoming emails.

Email marketer from Neil Patel Blog explains that including a plain text version of your email can improve deliverability, as it helps email providers identify you as a legitimate sender and not a spammer. Some older email clients and devices may also only be able to display plain text emails.

Email marketer from Reddit user u/EmailPro responds that plain text emails are beneficial for automated system notifications (e.g., server alerts) where formatting is unnecessary and for users with limited bandwidth or older devices.

Email marketer from Campaign Monitor explains that plain text emails are useful when the content is simple and primarily informational, such as order confirmations or password reset emails. They also load faster on slow connections.

Email marketer from Sendinblue shares that plain text emails are important when the device or mail provider doesn't support HTML, allowing them to fallback to the text version.

Email marketer from Mailchimp shares that plain text emails are good when you need something very simple with no images or complex formatting, or when you want to ensure that any client can use the email.

Marketer from Email Geeks explains that plain text emails are absolutely needed with M2M (machine to machine) processing of data stored in emails, often seen in banking, but it's not user facing.

Marketer from Email Geeks suggests that if you were trying to do some userland automations based on a messages content (e.g. IFTTT) then maybe plain text might be slightly safer for getting the best chance of pattern matching.

Email marketer from Hubspot answers that plain text emails are very useful because they help improve deliverability and can improve accessibility on older devices.

Expert from Email Geeks shares MUAs often use the preheader for notifications and preview. That’s just the first few lines of the mail payload with some heuristics applied, and if it’s a multipart/alternative with text/plain and text/html parts the plain text will come first.

Expert from SpamResource explains that plaintext versions of email are needed for some older email clients, accessibility reasons (screen readers), and that some spam filters score emails higher if they lack a plaintext part. This information was obtained by manually reviewing content on the website.

Expert from Email Geeks shares that Apple Watch supports plain text and its own rich text subset only, not full HTML.

Expert from Word to the Wise indicates that in some rare cases, older email clients may require the email to have a plaintext version to be readable. This information was obtained by manually reviewing content on the website.

Expert from Email Geeks explains that many ticketing systems don’t handle non-plain-text email at all well.

Expert from Email Geeks answers that it’s probably mostly wearables you need to worry about regarding devices that use plain text emails.

Documentation from Apple Support explains that Apple's Mail User Agent (MUA) can display emails in plain text. The user can choose to view all messages in plain text or allow HTML formatting, providing a level of user preference.

Documentation from Litmus explains that including a plain text version ensures compatibility across a wider range of email clients, including older versions and less sophisticated devices that may not fully support HTML rendering.

Documentation from IETF defines the standard for the format of Internet message bodies, specifying that email messages can contain a plain text part. Some systems may still rely solely on plain text emails.

Documentation from Microsoft Support explains that Microsoft outlook offers plain text options so it can be used for automated alerts or for a fallback version.

Documentation from Mozilla Developer Network explains that the MIME type 'text/plain' indicates a plain text document without formatting. Older email clients and simple devices rely on this format for displaying email content.