Although the vast majority of email programs now receive HTML messages just fine, online marketing speaker Tom Antion warns B2B marketers that some big companies have disabled their employee's ability to receive HTML email at work. Therefore, he says marketers and corporate communicators should never send just an HTML version of their messages.

HTML newsletter publisher Debbie Mayo-Smith has definitely noticed the effect on her Successful Internet Strategies list.She explains, "I've found the largest corporation's IT teams have put in firewalls that strip attachments. It's not that they're intentionally shutting off HTML, it's that they don't want to get caught out. 99% of the time they also strip the HTML header. (This is what tells the computer that it is an HTML message, not plain text.) So what the employee gets is gobbledy gook."

Sharon Tucci, President of ListHost.net, says, "With so many people at large companies accessing the Internet through intranets, many workers have never had work access to HTML email." She suggests that marketers dynamically serve their mailings using software that can determine which version -- text vs. HTML -- to send recipients. Tucci adds, "If you cannot serve text or HTML dynamically, you should have a default message. This should explain why the subscriber cannot see the HTML issue and how they can switch to plain text."