A nice email from Tuscany Networks in my inbox the other day:

Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:19:36 +0000
From: marketing
To: <elided>@bitfolk.com
Subject: DNSSEC- Become Compliant
Reply-To: marketing@tuscanynetworks.com

Your email client cannot read this email. To view it online, please go
here:
<URL elided>

To stop receiving these
emails:<URL elided>

So what happened here? They sent me a marketing email that they obviously considered too whizzy and shiny to allow me to read a plain text version of, so they inserted a plain text version that just says that my email client can’t read it. There actually is a HTML version and my mail client can probably read it fine, if I chose to ask it to, but since Tuscany Networks can’t work out how to send email properly I haven’t bothered looking.

Dear Tuscany Networks,

I would suggest that if you want to sell me on your DNSSEC knowledge then first you should try not making assumptions about what my email client supports.

Next you might like to try just putting a sensible text version of whatever your HTML was, since that would actually go beyond the bare minimum level of competency and start to approach actual usefulness.

Finally you might consider ditching the HTML entirely, since you got my address from a technical presentation on DNSSEC that was hosted by Nominet and I doubt flashy HTML emails go down all that well with the sort of people present. Save it for your fellow marketroids, who are more adept at finding ways to make each other’s utter shite show up in a different and annoying new way in Outlook Express than they are at deploying a secure DNS infrastructure.

No love,
Andy

PS Thanks for the unsubscribe link though; my mail client was still able to follow it despite not being good enough for the rest of your work, so that’s a problem that neither of us should have to face in the future.