Need help with html / plain text emails and MultiPart Mime

[mycview]

My company provides CRM tools. We have a client base of around ~2000 users, and many have set "send email notification" for when a new lead fills out a call-back or quote-request from their website. As such, we end up sending anywhere between 500 to 10,000 emails out per day, depending on the traffic from our client's websites.

We are, like every other business, suffering from the effects of spam email because several of our customers have started complaining that our notifications end up in their bulk mail folder, or do not arrive at all.

To add to the problem, our marketing department wants to start sending HTML-based emails so that we can include a better user interface for our customers to interact with, similar to those sent by big sites like half.com / ebay / netflix / amazon / etc. I know that these are usually flagged more as spam just because they are HTML and also some users can't read HTML-based emails.

That said, I am looking for suggestions to improve our deliverability. I have been told that switching to a "MultiPart Mime" format will help, because users that don't receive HTML by default can view the plain-text.

What suggestions / comments do you have to remedy our problem?

Thanks in advance!

[mshe]

Originally posted by mycview
That said, I am looking for suggestions to improve our deliverability. I have been told that switching to a "MultiPart Mime" format will help, because users that don't receive HTML by default can view the plain-text.


Multi-part only works if the e-mail client supports multi-part messages. There are still a couple of clients that do not.


How about asking the users to select HTML vs. Text. If the user selects the HTML newsletter, you'll send the HTML + text version. Otherwise, you'll send JUST the plain text?