[bt.com's website sent me my password in a malformed HTML mail. I asked for it again in ascii...]

Quoting “BT.COM Team” :

> Dear Mr Carter
>
> Thank you for your e-mail regarding our BT.com website.
>
> Please accept my apologies for the delay in replying to you and for any
> inconvenience this may have caused.
>
> I am sorry to inform you but we send our emails in HTML format and not in
> plain text. May I suggest you change your email settings on your PC so you
> can receive correspondence from us.

I am sorry to hear about this appalling shortcoming in your customer service.

It is a relatively simple matter to embed a plain text rendition of an email via the MIME mechanism. As you should be aware, setting a PC to render HTML mail lays me open to tracking attacks by spammers so it is unreasonable to expect me to accommodate you in this respect. (by analogy, it is like UPS asking me to leave my front door unlocked in case they want to deliver something)

In addition to this, my ‘PC software’ (in fact a webmail service) has problems with only two correspondents: yourselves and a local media arts mailing list who don’t even respond to unsubscribe requests. It is sad to see what should be a fine quality institution appearing in the same group as such amateurs.

> I hope this information has been useful to you

Thankyou, it will inform my future decisions regarding telco providers.

Regards,

Steve Carter

P.S. This email arrived fine with all the same settings. Perhaps the mail from the website was malformed? Or was this mail sent in plain text?