HTML:HTML Email
HTML is also used in email messages. Many email clients include a GUI HTML editor for composing emails and a rendering engine for displaying them once received. Use of HTML in email is quite controversial due to a variety of issues. The main benefit is the ability to decorate an email with presentational attributes (bold headings etc). However, there are a number of disadvantages, which include:
the recipient may not have an email client that can display HTML
the email has larger size because lots of formatting will be much larger than the plain text equivalent. This issue is made slightly worse by the fact that, for compatibility, most clients send a plaintext version as well.
overuse of formatting (there was at one stage a craze for making letterheads using HTML and sending them as part of every e-mail)
potential security issues of deluding the recipient to accept an email as being from an authoriative source (such as a bank) when this is not the case; this is related to phishing scams.
potential security issues of simply rendering a complex format like HTML.
For these reasons many mailing lists deliberately block HTML email either stripping out the HTML part to just leave the plain text part or rejecting the entire message.
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