On 01/22/02 08:20 AM, Myself wrote:

<snip>

> WTF is wrong with rich text mail? Seriously - I want to know. It's clear 
> there are people religous about it so I'd like to understand why some 
> people think mail and newsgroups must only be plain text.
> 

[These views are mine and mine alone]

Spam and OE are the 2 reasons why I dont like HTML mails. Particularly 2 
things I don't like

1. OE mails being displayed in utterly small fonts. Hence I feel the 
need to be able to view it as plaintext. A button somewhere would be 
excellent. Most mails that I do get from OE/Outlook don't contain any 
special rich text formatting. They are HTML only because OE/Outlook 
sends them that way.

2. Mails that try to get images from an external website. I *hate* this. 
The email client should never access an external website unless I ask it 
to. It should just display the message without grabbing anything from 
outside. This is different from browsing the web where I explicitly ask 
a web URL to be loaded. I am aware that images would be loaded (unless I 
have disabled them). But not while reading mail. Not unless I ask it to. 
I dont recollect getting useful mail from people that gets images from 
websites (mostly images are attached to those mails). The only mails 
that do this are spam and some mailing list HTML mails.

I see the advantages of rich text format. I have composed mails in HTML 
quite a few times. But at the same time I dont think that one needs to 
send HTML mails *all the time*. General communication can be done in 
plain text. I just got a 5K mail that has just 2 lines of text and a 4 
line signature. That same mail could have been sent in plain text and it 
would have taken up 1k of my mailbox and the two lines or signature did 
not really use (or need) any wonderful formatting. Do you see any reason 
why that person should have sent me that mail in HTML?

Pratik.



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