There are basically two reasons why you would want to create a plain text only part along with your HTML email.

1. Believe it or not, there are still some people out there who have their email clients configured to receive text-only email. If you have a plain text only part for your message (designed for text-only recipients) they will receive a nice text-only message in line with their settings and you will get your message across to that important, albeit small, segment of your list.

2. One of the things that antispam filters look at is image-to-text ratio. For this reason, it is important to balance image-heavy HTML messages with some text. So if you are using a large image to get your message across, you’d be wise to include a plain text part for your message to satisfy antispam filters lurking between you and your customers.

So how do you add a text-only part to your HTML message? It’s actually very easy.

At the bottom of the GroupMail message editor, you will see several tabs. The middle tab says Plain Text Message Part. Click that tab.

Then, check the “Optional: Include a Plain Text only part with this Rich Text (HTML) message” and then mark the “Include the specified text as the Plain Text part.” Here, you can copy and paste or write a custom text version of your message, using text-only formatting as necessary. Remember that you can’t use hyperlinks in text-only messages, so you will have to use full URL paths (http://…) if you want to link recipients to a website.

The only people who will see the plain text version of your message are those recipients who have their email client configured to receive text-only email and antispam filters looking for some text to balance the images in your HTML message. Everyone else will only see your beautiful HTML email design.