I think the major email clients are sending mixed signals. They want to help prevent spammers from getting an edge, but they are doing so at a huge cost to customers. One example of this is the act of not displaying images. This is definitely important because it is often used as a beacon to determine if the image is opened, this is very important to email marketers, but it is also used by spammers to determine if an email address is valid, and if they’ve found a sucker who will open the email. So email recipients are given the option to display pictures after they have verified that the email isn’t spam, fantastic.
One problem with this idea is Alt tags. These tags are attributes of an image, and are set by the document creator. These are used by page readers as well as in situations where images aren’t loaded. They allow the customer to understand what it is that they aren’t seeing. The problem, as brought to light by Campaign Monitor, is that most email clients aren’t displaying these Alt tags, or they are doing so in an inconsistant manner. Here is a situation where the Alts are most useful, but where they are being neglected. I understand that the Alts could be disceptive, but in the absense of any other display tool, they are the best we have.
Please put them back in…