Text or html – how does your school handle emails
Text or html?
The School of Educational Administration recently undertook a survey of 2300 primary and secondary schools to find out if they view their incoming email advertisements as HTML (that is with layout and links) or as text-only, where all the design features are stripped out.
Around 25% of those we asked replied – probably the largest proportion of respondents we have ever had for one of our surveys – and 88% confirmed that they were reading in HTML, with 12% saying they could see the text only. This means that there are still issues around the inclusion of images as they cannot be viewed in the text-only version – and that it is advisable to include full email and web addresses as where they are hidden (eg click here) they may not be accessible in the text only version.
The overwhelming majority of you confirmed that you were reading the email through Outlook or Outlook Express.
Thanks very much to everyone who took part in the survey. The message I believe that comes out of this is that if you are restricting staff in your school to text-only emails you are retstricting what teachers and others can see on the messages that they want to get – and the vast majority of schools are not finding HTML as a problem.
You can read more about the School of Educational Administration on www.admin.org.uk
Tony Attwood
School of Educational Administration