A normal campaign sends a formatted HTML email. Turn on Plain-text email and the campaign sends a single plain text part instead: no HTML, no formatting, no layout. Recipients see the words you wrote and nothing else. Everything that has to be there is still there, including the unsubscribe link, your postal address, and any attachments.

The trade is on measurement. Open tracking works by loading an invisible image from the HTML part, so a plain-text campaign has nowhere to put it and opens can never be counted. Laureo reports that honestly as Unavailable rather than showing you a zero that looks like a real result. Click tracking still works, and tracked links appear as full URLs in the text.

1. Open Marketing, then Campaigns, and select New Campaign.
2. On the Content step, write your subject and body as usual.
3. Below the body editor, check Plain-text email.
4. Check the preview on the right. It switches to the flattened text, so what you see is what sends.
5. Use Send test to myself to receive the real plain-text version in your own inbox.

While the checkbox is on, the formatting toolbar is hidden, because none of it would survive the send. Your formatting is not thrown away: it stays stored on the draft, so clearing the checkbox restores the formatted version exactly as you left it. The setting is off by default on a new campaign and belongs to that one campaign. Duplicating a campaign keeps it.

• Paragraphs, line breaks, headings, and list items become plain lines of text.
• A link becomes its visible text followed by the full URL in brackets. If the visible text was already the address, it appears once. Email and phone links keep only their label, since the address is already the text.
• An image is replaced by its alt text in square brackets, so an image with a caption still carries meaning.
• The unsubscribe line and your business postal address are added at the end. If your body already carries an opt-out link or the same address, it is not added a second time.
• Attachments are unaffected and send exactly as they would on a formatted campaign.
• Preview text has no effect. It works by hiding a line inside the HTML, and there is no HTML here to hide it in.
• Follow-up stages on the same campaign send as plain text too, including the test send.

Both tracking controls live under Tracking & category on the Review step.

Wherever an open figure would normally appear for a plain-text campaign, Laureo shows the word Unavailable instead of a number, with this explanation on hover: “This campaign sends plain text only, so there is no HTML part to carry the open pixel. Opens cannot be measured. Clicks are still tracked, as full redirect URLs.” A zero would read as a real measurement, and it would quietly poison any average built on top of it.

You will see it in these places:

• The Opened figure in the campaign detail stat strip.
• The recipients list on the campaign detail page, where the Opened segment is removed, since it could never match anyone.
• The results tables for a subject line test and for a full version test.
• The per-campaign table in Campaigns analytics. Sorting by open rate moves plain-text campaigns to the bottom rather than ranking them as the worst performers.
• The Campaigns analytics summary, when every campaign in the period sends plain text. A period that mixes both still reports a truthful open rate, because plain-text sends are left out of both sides of the calculation.
• A contact’s engagement panel, the contact context panel in the inbox, and the home dashboard.
• The campaigns CSV export, where the opened cell is left empty rather than zero. A Plain text only column is exported beside the stats so a reader can tell an empty cell from a measured zero.

• A short personal note from a named person, where a designed template would look wrong.
• Outbound that is meant to read like a message a colleague typed, and to be replied to.
• Audiences where replies are the goal, so losing the open figure costs you nothing you were acting on.
• Any send where you would rather not carry images, buttons, or a branded header at all.

Leave it off for newsletters, product announcements, and anything that needs layout, images, or a call-to-action button. Those campaigns also keep a real open rate, which is worth having when you plan to use it.

• Plain text is a per-campaign choice, not a workspace setting. Two campaigns can differ.
• Turning it off restores your formatted body untouched, so you can compare the two before sending.
• Replies, bounces, unsubscribes, and every follow-up stop condition behave exactly as they do on a formatted campaign.
• If your workspace uses its own tracking domain, plain-text links and the unsubscribe address use that domain too. See Using Your Own Tracking Domain.