HTML Email

[Jonathan Hale]

Only two things to say to this:

"As a corporate Webmaster in charge of seven divisional sites, I get a
lot of spam. In the nine days I was out on vacation this summer, I
received 648 spam messages and 12 valid messages.

The best filter? If you shunt any HTML-encoded message into a folder
marked "spam?" you will catch 90% to 95% of all spam with a better than
99% accuracy. Such a filter will catch a few newsletters, but they are
generally no great loss. I have never received a valid HTML-encoded
message that gained anything from the coding, nor an HTML message with
information I could not afford to lose.

If all business and personal correspondence were in ASCII plain text or
mime encoded, the spammers would be caught between a rock and a hard
place: If they use HTML, it goes to trash; if they use plain text,
corporate filtering becomes more effective."
--Kratschmer, Eric.  "Spam solutions."  NETWORK WORLD Volume 20,
09/01/03: 32.

>> All of these argu(e)ments are based on a single core idea: language
is a communication tool that
>> should be efficient and useful.

"COMMUNICATION n. a sending, giving or exchanging (of information,
ideas, etc.)"
--THE NEW LEXICON WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. Lexicon
Publications, Inc.: New York: 1987.

Not very "efficient and useful" if there is no exchange (i.e., it never
gets seen...)