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The right way is to follow the HTML standard. You can validate your HTML page here.
Your mail client should follow it and should throw away what's not supported or what's insecure, like JavaScript.
I'll expose some reasons why following standards could be beneficial here:
Whether or not you include the html/head/body tags is entirely irrelevant — they are always optional and will not affect the rendering of the document in any way.
What matters most is whether quirks mode is on or not. Unfortunately, you can’t control that in a webmail setting. Tables and inline styles are your friends. Your best bet is to test in as many webmail and desktop clients as you can.
Many of the posts on this thread are rather old, and as a result they are no longer accurate.
These days HTML emails should include a doctype, html and body declaration if you intend to do anything fancy at all.
There are a multitude of guides on this subject which can help you learn how to properly code HTML Email, but most of them disregard the specifics of a doctype, which is how I stumbled on your question.
I suggest you read the following 2 posts which are from reputable teams familiar with the various problems:
campaign monitor's take
email on acid's take
Depends entirely on the email client that receives it. In my experience, most email clients that will interpret HTML don't care if you have full body/head/html tags, etc. In fact you don't even need those tags for most browsers. You need to have the head tags to include style/title, etc. Otherwise they are not really necessary, per se. I've never seen them to be necessary.
There's 1 thing I know to be true: Using HTML opening and closing tags will help in general spam scoring due to the fact that many such appliance based filters and software firewalls will add a point or so to an email that uses html but does not use the opening and closing tags.
I don't think there is a right way but trying to make the email viewable in as many email readers as posible.
I usually check the emails in Thunderbird, because Outlook forgives more.
In Thunderbird this is the HTML code for an email (i have an extension that shows the html)
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
This is the body text<br>
<div class="moz-signature"><i><br>
<br>
Regards<br>
Alex<br>
</i></div>
</body>
</html>
BTW, i use plain text email for all my web forms every time I can. I had many issues with blackberry email using html+plain text emails.
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