HTML Mail

[Jonathan Hutchins]

It has always been considered courteous to post in plain ASCII text, in 
english, to general interest mailing lists.  This goes back to the original 
Usenet and beyond, and there's no need to change it.  It is courteous to your 
audience to make a minor effort to be understood by all. 
 
I don't see much difference between HTML mail and spam.  Both are unnecessary.  
Email is text, and as such does not require fancy colors, or for you to 
specify a spiffy font for me to view.  Plain text works best, because the end 
user can specify whatever display characteristics work best for him.  It is 
parsable by the widest range of possible readers - including text-to-speech 
for the blind. 
 
HTML mail is usually just for ego boosting - "look at my kewl stationery".  
"Isn't our corporate logo intimidating?"  Any decent template system can 
generate plain text.  Korea, spam capital of the world, may well use HTML so 
they can have fancy colored characters in the spam they send me, but I'm 
pretty sure you can do the same thing with ASCII code pages if you're not 
trying to sell me marine radios. 
 
I use some very good spam filtering software, software good enough that I 
don't see most of the spam that people reply to on this list.  One of the nice 
things it does is look at HTML messages, because 90% of HTML mail IS spam.  
It's bright enough to pass your RTF posts. 
 
All that is irrelevant though.  Your recent posts show clearly that your 
system can generate plain text messages.  Outlook and other modern mail 
clients can specify that recipient kclug at kclug.org received plain text only if 
you just bother to peruse the fine clickable preference menus.  A little 
effort at courtesy is all I'm asking. 
   

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