On: Why does email development have to suck? – Explain...

[bilalq]

I just checked, and they don't. It's certainly plain looking and without fancy styling/formatting, but they do send content-type text/html. The links and tracking pixel images are why they need HTML, I guess.

[chungy → bilalq]

There's an account setting somewhere to always send plain text emails and do not send HTML. I don't know where the setting is, I enabled it many years ago. Been happy with that.

[m463 → bilalq]

This appears to be untrue. I looked at all the amazon emails in my inbox and they are all:

  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[bilalq → m463]

Did you actually scroll through all the way? Some emails send both plain text and HTML. I looked through mine and indeed saw text/html for most Amazon emails (including AWS). Some AWS emails like ACM cert renewals were text/plain. Though like someone else said here, you may have changed a setting in your account preferences. The default is still HTML.

    ------=_Part_4161549_398020174.1685704999675
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

[m463 → bilalq]

I have zero html attachments.

(These emails are not marketing emails which I don't get, they all relate to orders and shipping)

[JimDabell → m463]

They aren’t talking about HTML attachments. HTML email is typically sent as a multipart/alternative email with one text/plain component and one text/html component. An email with attachments is a multipart/mixed email.

[mr_mitm → bilalq]

Mine have the text/plain header. I must have checked that setting like the sibling commenter said.

[jimmaswell → bilalq]

Tracking pixel in an email? I thought nobody had done that in decades because major webmail clients pre-cache all images to prevent leaking user IP etc.

[bilalq → jimmaswell]

I don't know about decades. It's true that a lot of clients do that nowadays, but they're definitely still used.