Email, Messaging, & Video Calls Email Send Your Email Marketing Messages as Multipart Alternative by Heinz Tschabitscher Writer A former freelance contributor who has reviewed hundreds of email programs and services since 1997. our editorial process Heinz Tschabitscher Updated on March 17, 2020 Seth Lemmons / CC BY 2.0 license Email Yahoo! Mail Gmail Tweet Share Email Some users have set their email preferences to accept messages in HTML format, while others may have chosen to receive emails only in plain text to combat privacy and security issues. If you're sending a marketing email, sending your messages as multipart alternative will display your message correctly in either HTML or plain text formatting, so you'll be able to reach more of your prospects. What Is Multipart/Alternative? Multipart/alternative emails contain both plain text and HTML. What a user sees depends on their set preferences or what's allowed by their email client. If an email client can't render HTML messages, it will display the plain text version. HTML-enabled email programs will usually show the rich HTML version unless users have set a preference for plain-text email only. Sending multipart alternative messages is a great solution to reach all your subscribers without having to maintain two separate lists. How It Works To deliver your marketing messages as multipart/alternative emails, make sure your email marketing software or service provider supports this format. Some service providers create a plain text version of your HTML messages automatically, but it's important to verify the quality of that message. Usually, you'll compose both a rich HTML version of your message and a plain text equivalent, and then send them together as one multipart alternative message. The process differs depending on your email marketing software or service, so check the process for your particular tool. How Does Multipart Alternative Work? Multipart alternative emails make use of the MIME email standard. The individual parts are sent similarly to attached files, so email programs recognize them as alternative versions. Rather than showing all versions of the email, it displays only the preferred version. The alternative versions in a multipart/alternative email are separated by a boundary marker, which is identical for all versions. Each email version also has a MIME content type assigned. This is where the versions differ. With multipart alternative marketing emails, the content types will typically be "text/plain" and "text/HTML." The types follow each other, and email programs will usually display the last version they're capable of showing. This means "text/plain" followed by "text/HTML" in multipart alternative emails unless users have set a certain preference. Multipart/Alternative Example The source of an email using multipart alternative formatting could look like this: From: Sender <sender@example.com>To: recipient@example.comSubject: ExampleDate: Fri, 13 Nov 2015 19:36:00 +0000 (GMT)MIME-version: 1.0Content-type: multipart/alternative; boundary="Boundary_MA2"--Boundary_MA2Content-type: text/plain; CHARSET=US-ASCII; format=flowedContent-transfer-encoding: 7BITThis is but a test.--Boundary_MA2Content-type: text/html; CHARSET=US-ASCIIContent-transfer-encoding: 7BIT<html><body><div><em>This</em> is but a test.</div></body></html>--Boundary_MA2-- Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Get the Latest Tech News Delivered Every Day Email Address Sign up There was an error. Please try again. You're in! Thanks for signing up. There was an error. Please try again. Thank you for signing up. Tell us why! Other Not enough details Hard to understand Submit