Dale wrote:
Few words of advice. Bottom post and email text only. Folks will
stomp on you until there is a mudhole then stomp it dry if you do
either of those. Then add in that most block emails that have HTML
in it so they will not see what you post anyway. I'm not sure why
they block HTML but I was told they do.
My motorcycling mailing list was having a number of issues with HTML
mails as well. Here's a little writeup I did on why HTML was causing
problems.
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The Chivinmoto email lists accept the original mail, runs it through a
process that reads the email, then rewrites it with ads at the bottom or
events at the top, looks up who should get the email, and then sends
them out. Just about all email lists use this sort of process whether
they are adding things to the email or not. It's just something you have
to support if you want anyone to use your product.
The above is trivial for anything that is plain text. With the advent
of HTML formated mail this got extremely hard to do correctly in all
cases. In order to process an HTML mail and resend it I have to load
nine packages just to parse and write the HTML correctly in the mail
software. And as we've noticed it doesn't always work so well due to
bugs in the parsing software and libraries, different HTML styles in
various programs, and different HTML rendering engines in the mail
client trying to read the email. If this breaks enough we start seeing
the now infamous blank email problem.
Additionally most mail lists attempt to sanitize the email as well.
HTML emails can be formatted to take advantage of bugs in the mail
client or OS of the machine that reads them. You can also embed tracking
info and other things. Sanitizing in my case takes another three
packages on the server.
In summary manipulating HTML mails is hard, no one package does it
well, and expect screwy things to happen.
I highly suggest sending plain text emails to any mailing list. It
always works, transfers less data, and nobody needs to see anything
blink. Most mail clients will allow you to set "outgoing mail is plain
text always" or something similar. Newer mail clients will allow you to
specify "always send plain text to blahblah.com" which is a nice
compromise if you need the ability to send HTML mails normally. I know
Mozilla, Thunderbird, and Outlook support the latter. I'm reasonably
sure you can do that in Apple Mail and the latest Eudora, but can't say
for certain.
kashani, who knows entirely too much about how email can be broken
1974 CB350F, now with 21HP
*----
Our case was odd because the software really was crap, but eliminating
HTML mails was much quicker solution than getting the provider to fix
the problems their upgrade caused. Additionally I have ticketing systems
at work that occasionally break HTML mails when a new client or Perl
package comes out. The whole thing is a big pain in the ass though
Gentoo lists seems to do pretty well with HTML in general. However I run
1900x1200 on my laptop and HTML tends to look like crap since it ignores
my carefully selected font sizes.
kashani
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