On Tuesday, September 17, 2002, at 01:36 PM, Tony LaFemina wrote:

> Your reaction to this HTML thing in e-mail sounds synonymous with the 
> movie Pleasantville, which is currently being shown on cable. I 
> personally think it should be left up to the sender of the e-mail on 
> how they want to format it. Both Netscape and Outlook Express are free 
> downloads and recognize both plain text and HTML. If anyone has a mail 
> program that can't read HTML, then let them download one of these if 
> they want.

This isn't quite my reasoning. The original question was about styled 
mail in digested lists. That's often a bad idea because the list 
manager software doesn't strip out the coding and just sends it as 
plain text. This sometimes makes it hard to read the mail.

There are plenty of people who have only limited support for styled 
text in their e-mail programs. There are many people who use Pine and 
Mutt under Unix to read mail. On the Mac Mulberry (my favorite) and 
Powermail have only limited support. Mailsmith has almost no support.

Besides for many messages, such as this one, there is no reason to use 
styled mail. It would just double the size of the mail after all the 
HTML garbage is added.

---
Lee Larson, Mathematics Department, University of Louisville
Phone: 502.852.6826 FAX: 502.852.7132


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