Morons who send out newsletter e-mails that start with the line "If you cannot view the below email, please click here" really piss me off. Apart from the accessibility issues with the phrase "click here", people who need to access this link can't because they are using a e-mail client that doesn't support HTML. Two major Australian companies that do this are Telstra Big Pond and Ford Australia.
The first Big Pond is Australia's largest internet provider and should know better or at least send the e-mail as both plain text and HTML. The second (Ford) you may be willing to give a little leeway as they are only a car company.
I too thought it was fair enough that they may not be aware of the stupid thing they are doing, so I wrote them a detailed polite e-mail explaining the issues and giving them the solution. It was fun find a e-mail address to sending to but I found one on their website and sent it off.
I actually got a polite reply thanking me and let me know that the section that received wasn't the one that would have to deal with it, but they would send it on. Well it went to the black hole, they never replied to me and have never corrected their stupid practices.
It has now been over a year and even marketing people should have been able to grasp the e-mail content in this length of time. Maybe they are just saying if you are not using a HTML enabled e-mail client they don't want you to buy a Ford. This does seem a funny message for marketing to be sending but I get it and will look elsewhere.
So what is the solution to this obviously difficult e-mail dilemma? It's really hard and here it is… change the line to read:
"If you cannot view the below e-mail, please go to http://www.the.bloody.address"
Now all the people have to do is copy the address and paste it in the address bar of the web browser. If you must, you can even put HTML tags around the address to link it to the website.