Tony Finch writes: > On Sun, 6 Jul 2008, H.Merijn Brand wrote: > > > Of course there are people that send HTML mail that *adds* > > information, but in my experience, they are the exception to the > > rule. > > "My replies are below in red"
I've encountered things like that too -- where somebody has sent a message with multiple alternative parts, but the plain text part suffers data-loss compared with the part that I'm not reading. If the formatting is essential to the message then just send it as HTML, and I'll be forced to read it; I only picked the plain text version that _you_ created because it's there and you labelled it as being an alternative. Whenever I've brought this up with senders of such mail -- who all turned out to be Microsoft Outlook users -- they seemed surprised to discover Outlook was sending messages which made such claims on their behalfs. Also, it appears that Outlook generates the plain text part automatically, simply stripping formatting (rather than, say, using stars to denote emboldened words), and doesn't give the sender a chance to edit this part separately from the HTML part. I don't think it even gives a way of viewing its automatically generated plain text supposed alternative. (But this is second-hand knowledge; I've never used Outlook, only received mails sent using it.) This is truly hateful. Sending a message that's potentially different from what the sender intended (while labelling it as being a perfectly acceptable version of it, and hiding it from the sender) is inexcusable. Smylers
