E-Mail

E-mail art (sometimes called "Electronic Mail Art") is simply any kind of art sent by e-mail. It includes computer graphics, animations, screensavers, digital scans of artwork in other media, or even ASCII art. When exhibited, e-mail art can be either displayed on a computer screen or similar type of display device, or the art can be printed out and displayed.

There is an ongoing debate among some artists as to just what the relationship of e-mail art to mail art should be considered to be. In addition to questions about whether this is even a valid or meaningful genre of art, as clearly almost any kind of digital-based art can be e-mailed, thus making it into "e-mail art," has been particular criticism of e-mail art by tradition-minded mail artists when the e-mail art has been perceived to be akin to mass media. Other criticisms of e-mail art from a mail artist's perspective have focused on the lack of dimensionality of the attachment, the lack of intimacy as opposed to real mail.

Many of the criticisms overlap those levelled against the Internet and World Wide Web in general.

The surrealist game of exquisite corpse has also been adapted to e-mail.
HTML e-mail is the use of a subset of HTML (often ill-defined) to provide formatting and semantic markup capabilities in e-mail that are not available with plain text.

Most graphical e-mail clients support HTML e-mail, and many default to it.[1] Many of these clients include both a GUI editor for composing HTML e-mails and a rendering engine for displaying received HTML e-mails.

HTML mail allows the sender to properly express quotations (as in inline replying), headings, bulleted lists, emphasized text, subscripts and superscripts, and other visual and typographic cues to improve the readability and aesthetics of the message, as well as semantic information encoded within the message, such as the original author and Message-ID of a quote. Long URLs can be linked to without being broken into multiple pieces, and text is wrapped to fit the width of the user agent's viewport, instead of uniformly breaking each line at 78 characters (defined in RFC 2822, which was necessary on older text terminals). It allows in-line inclusion of tables, as well as diagrams or mathematical formulae as images, which are otherwise difficult to convey (typically using ASCII art).
Compatibility
As HTML mail is more complex than plain text, it is also more prone to compatibility issues and has problems with rendering consistently across platforms and software.

Some popular clients do not render consistently with W3C specifications, and many HTML e-mails are not compliant, either, which may cause rendering or delivery problems, especially for users of MSN or Hotmail.[4]

In particular, the tag, which is used to house CSS style rules for an entire HTML document, is not well supported, sometimes stripped entirely, causing in-line style declarations to be the de facto standard, even though they are not optimal from a semantic web point of view.[6][dead link] Although workarounds have been developed,[7] this has caused no shortage of frustration among newsletter developers, spawning the grassroots Email Standards Project, acid test which grades email clients on their rendering of an acid test, inspired by those of the Web Standards Project, and lobbies developers to improve their products.[8] To persuade Google to improve rendering in Gmail, for instance, they published a video montage of grimacing web developers, resulting in attention from an employee.