Sending emails with HTML or not?

[Jason Brawner]

I am developing an application which will send 1000's of emails (via JavaMail) and I'm debating on whether or not to send html in the email. I have two questions:
1. Do most email clients support html? Most of the recipients of the emails will be AOL, hotmail/msn, or yahoo clients. Are there any stats on how many people are running clients that don't support html?
2. The emails I send require an embedded image. Can I send an email with an image and it not be a html email? If so, how? A multipart email? If anybody has an example that would be great!
I'd prefer to not use HTML if possible.
Thanks,

[Jim Wang]

Hi, Jason:
I have an application, which needs to send feedback to client. Since I can figure out the email address of my clients, I think that would be good to send beedback by email, but I don't know how. Would you give a hint of how to do this?
Thanks.
Jim

[Prashanth menon]

Email can be sent in HTML format from javaMail by setting the contenttype of the message as text/html
Most email clients accept the html contents including the image. I recive mails in outlook as well as the hotmail which are in html.
regds
Prashanth

[Zakaria Haque]

Originally posted by Jason Brawner:

2. The emails I send require an embedded image. Can I send an email with an image and it not be a html email? If so, how? A multipart email? If anybody has an example that would be great!

what you mean by embedded image? You can send attachment in a multipart message.

[Mike Curwen]

1. I think most clients support it, but equally, most people seem annoyed by it. Especially *nix users.

2. Yes, you could send it multipart through JavaMail. There are pretty good examples in Appendix B of the "JavaMail API Design Specification" pdf document, available from java.sun.com/products/javamail/JavaMail-1.2.pdf

Note, that's the API *spec* and not the API.