On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, Lee Larson wrote: > 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.
The bits that confuse me are when a mail agent such as Pine will handle HTML fine, and then when it'll get another HTML email that it just plain doesn't handle. I've never figured out what the difference is. Anyway, for a lot of email, Pine/Mutt handle HTML. It could be that some mail browsers send Text and HTML when you tick the send-HTML option, or it could be that pine/mutt do basic parsing. Now, the bad thing is when people either: a) Rely on colour differentiation in their reply rather than '>'. Lotus Notes users do this a lot. They're used to the reply being red and the incoming being black etc. However it doesn't read in other agents. b) People drag a picture into their mail agent [such as Outlook] rather than attaching. This uses MS-only 'HTML' extensions and plain fails to work in many browsers. Hen The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be September 24 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
