Finding The Text
This post is part of our series Emails for Everyone. Find the entire ongoing exploration here.
Is there text in these emails?
After receiving so many all-image emails, I was left to wonder: is there text arriving with these emails that I’m not aware of?
When you send or receive an email through an email sending platform, you’ll receive either an HTML email, or a plain text email. (Examples follow if this is new to you!)
This can be a little confusing because the term “plain text” is used to refer to:
an email sent out without HTML formatting
a version of your email that is sent along with your HTML formatted email, in plain text (We can call this the plain text version.)
We’re talking about the plain text versions that get sent with your emails, since an email that is already formatted in text already addresses this specific accessibility issue.
The plain text version is generated by most email sending software, from the text and links in your email, and in most software, you can also edit or add text.
Yet, I hadn’t seen any plain text delivered along with these all-image emails, and I wasn’t even sure where I could find it in Gmail (my primary email app) or Apple Mail, either on my iPhone or on my desktop.
According to Litmus Labs (the source that is quoted in pretty much every blog post on email app usage) found in December of 2019 that Apple’s iPhone Mail app is used 37% of the time (based on data from 973 million email opens) followed by Gmail at 25% and Apple Mail at 10%. (Source: Litmus Labs) So, I feel like I’m on the right track with exploring accessibility in these apps.
An Experiment
I wanted to be absolutely sure that I couldn’t receive the plain text version of an email in Gmail and Apple Mail, so I created an experiment.
I set up an all-image newsletter to send to myself through Campaign Monitor. (I am tired of winter...)
It’s important to note that if you only include an image or images, the plain text version isn’t magically ripped from the text you placed in your graphics. Here is what my un-edited plain text version looked like for this email:
Here is the plain text version I wrote up, with different text so we can easily track which version we’re viewing.
So, what happened?
Here is what happened in Gmail (Apple Mail, and Mail and Gmail for the iPhone are basically identical) with the images on.
All as expected!
Here is Gmail (and Apple Mail, and Mail and Gmail for the iPhone) without images.
All the content has turned into a small image symbol.
I tried every solution I could Google and every button I could click to find our plain text message in Gmail and Apple Mail. (There are some outdated ways to view plain text in both out in the internet, but they no longer work.) It’s just not possible, which is extremely unfortunate.
I tried out Gmail’s Basic HTML version to see if it had a way to view the plain text version, but it did not. It just looked like the email sent to the regular version with uglier menu bars and colors surrounding it.
How do you read plain text versions of emails in gmail?
Plain text versions of emails DO NOT display in Gmail or Apple Mail. (I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong! Let me know!) There is no way to view them, except opening up the original source, and finding the text in the code.
To do this, click the More button (the three dots) at the top right of your message window and select “Show original.” The plain text version, if included, will be in the code.
This might make clearing your inbox (or finding the coupon code for that great sale) quite a trial.
So, where’s the text?
I finally found the plain text version, but I had to download Thunderbird to make it happen.
Kudos to Mozilla for keeping this option! I know many people are big Thunderbird fans, but it’s not quite my cup of tea. (I find it harder to navigate than Gmail in the browser. I’ve also found some mentions that Thunderbird doesn’t play well with common screen readers. I want to look into this more.) So, I feel really bad for people who are having their email client/app options so unnecessarily limited, both by the developers and designers or Gmail and Apple Mail, and by the people sending emails without text in their primary version.
I also understand that this is very easy to do in Outlook.
You can find numbers on which email clients your subscribers are using in most email marketing software, but remember that people may have had to adjust their choices based on the design issues in emails.
Here are some email marketing services that I saw were used for the all-image newsletters that I’ve been receiving. Each of these apps sends a plain text version along with the HTML email, but remember, if your email doesn’t have any text in it, and you don’t add it directly to the plain text version, it will also be blank.
Campaign Monitor
Kmail
Klaviyo
Mailchimp
Emma
No plain text versions:
Constant Contact (from what I can tell from their help section. I’ve never used it.)
What Change Can I Make Right Now?
Next week, I’ll share some recommendations, but for the moment: just add text to your emails.
Learn More
Why you need text in your emails
Finding The Text
By Nicole Bemboom