Making Email Useful

I just got a copy of the Gather "news and updates" newsletter that I subscribed to the last time I was editing my preferences. It was in all-HTML. I read most of my email in a plain text reader, and even though it does display HTML for me (using lynx to filter the text through), I find it annoying. So I didn't read the newsletter, and unsubscribed.

Most of the emails Gather sends me are multipart/alternative, which means they have both text and HTML. Normally when I get emails like that, to save storage space, I delete the HTML portion (which is redundant, but several times as large). What if there were a way for me to select, on the preferences page, whether I wanted email in text, or HTML, or multipart/alternative (a sensible default)? Lots of sites do that.

But with Gather emails, there's another problem: Most of them could be much more useful than they are. When someone comments on one of my articles, or sends me a message, the email from Gather could just give me the full text of the comment or message. Instead, it gives me the first line or two.. and then goes on for a page worth of boilerplate cruft that I ignore. Usually, that stuff is much longer than the comment or message that got trunctated. And as far as my cursory glance tells me, it's the same cruft every time, and it's not interesting.

I save all my comment notifications from LiveJournal because they're actually useful: They just quote the thing replied to, include the full text of the comment, and links to get me back to the original post or reply to the comment. I find my email archive of LiveJournal comments a very useful place to search for old posts or discussions I've had, and to find the right page on LiveJournal. Gather emails, so far, aren't useful like that. All they do is notify me that I should look on Gather for the comment or message. If that's all they do, the emails could simply contain a brief line and a link.

I'd prefer clean, simple emails that include the entire message or comment or notification of event, and nothing else. And I'd prefer to set, in my preferences, whether I want text or html or both. I think these two changes would make Gather email much more useful, and less annoying. Right now it straddles the edge, IMO.