We've mostly gone on, but in reviewing this week's posts I noticed one
thing from David that I want to respond to:
"David W. Tamkin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Unless the poster is on a setup (such as AOL 6.0) that pushes HTML mail
> onto customers with all the selections preset, I've found that plain text
> is *less* poster-intensive. The writer doesn't have to pick out
> stationery, typefaces, colors, borders, type sizes, emphasis styles, and
> all those other things that would leave me scratching my head for what to
> choose if I couldn't send plain text.
Yes, plain text is much easier than hand-composed HTML/rich text, which is
why we smart folks are using plain text here :) however, today's "rich
mailers" - not just AOL but Outlook Express, newer flavors of Eudora, etc -
tend to offer customizable 'stationery' preferences, so that the simplest
'yeah me too!' reply posting, which took the member 3 seconds to write and
send, still arrives trying to look like rainbow Old English text on a
background of purple flowers. That's why, when you choose the Sisyphean
approach of "re-educating" your members, many of them don't even know they
WERE sending HTML, let alone why they should change, and nevermind how.
Or there's things like the dread Javamail, which (as installed on some mail
services) insists on building even one "hi there" line of plain text into a
multipart/mixed bundle containing a single text/plain subcomponent. Yecch!
and the user has no control. Filter and forget, sez i. (Actually I think
I had to extend demime to handle that occurrence, it's been a while.)
