It all depends on who you're e-mailing. Security concious people (a large slice of people here :), read email as text only, or with HTML rendering disabled. HTML enabled emails often call external images/other resources. These are often used to:

• log whether an email has been read
• authenticate an email address in a spammer's database

These privacy issues alone will deter many users from having HTML enabled in the first place.

By sending users a link to a form rather than the actual form, you can:

• ensure everybody sees the link in a text message
• update the form easily - if you sent it to 1000 people and, after the first 20 or so submissions come in, realized you needed to add a field to clarify something, you'd be screwed. If they have a link to the form, you can just quickly amend the form HTML and all is well and good.

If you're targetting intranet users, or are sure of your demographic, then send HTML forms by all means. But, if you do, it's considered polite to:

• at the very least, include a text version of the html (with appropriate link)
• if possible, allow users to select themselves whether they would prefer to receive HTML or text emails, and only send them the section they requested (HTML or text exclusively).

If in doubt, ask a selection of your user base which they'd prefer.

cLive ;-)

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