Quote Originally Posted by gjh42 View Post
One thing seems to be being ignored here. You say the majority (even if it's the "vast majority") of your customers want HTML e-mail. Has ANYONE ever knowingly selected text only on your site? If so, you are going against their explicit wishes and it is possible that your HTML e-mails will not display properly in their inbox depending on their mail client. You are eliminating all choice for them. Think about that one...

If you think (most of) your old customers would have selected HTML, it would be possible to change their settings in the database (I don't know exactly how, and wouldn't try to tell you if I did) and leave current and new customers the freedom to receive your e-mails in their preferred format.
gjh42, it wasn't ignored, linnix answered that objection on the first page, as have I. Business's thrive by reaching customers and convincing them to buy. If even 5% of the email receivers object to receiving HTML mail is basically irrelevant to whether or not sending the HTML mail is the best way to spur increased revenue from the other 95%. As RodG has abundantly pointed out, those who object to HTML mail will A:) send them to the spam box, B:) disregard them or C:) unsubscribe and possibly stop doing business (although that is an extreme example). Those are options that people have, so no, he is not "eliminating all choice for them", this isn't a violation of a person's body for crying out loud.

This same kind of problem presents itself in the bar world where a few people object to having smoking allowed, yet choose to go into those establishments and force others, including the business owner to conform to their views. Its not as though people don't have the option of going some place else. And yet, in the United States a few ruin it for the many... why is that? Its a symptom of a much larger issue.

More to the point, all of us (including myself) have been talking about the ethics, and have indeed ignored the issue of how it could be accomplished. This thread wasn't asking if it was right, it was asking how to accomplish it because that's the business choice he was making. So to tell someone you wouldn't help them even if you knew how is a waste of space and I argue every bit as rude and irrelevant to the initial question (which he has already solved).