On 01/22/02 10:56 AM, Myself wrote: > > Pratik wrote: > > >>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. >> > > > Hehehe, well "blame it on Micros~1" is an argument that does resonate > with me... ;-) > > > >>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 don't see the diff from loading a webpage. But anyway, mail prefs like > Ximian Evolution has it seems would address this (see other message in > this thread).
If there were a pref in Mozilla to address this, I would be much happier. > >>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? >> > > > Hmm, well let's see. We could ask a mailer to auto-send as plaintext if > there's no formatting or if size to actual text content is some ratio... Do you seriously thing Microsoft will implement such a thing? > but why bother? In programming some time ago we used to use bits in > bytes for flags, nowdays we (mostly) don't care. Sure, it saves some > space but space is not the premium it once was. Higher level languages > and their ease outweighed the save some space concern. I agree but still sending a 5k mail is just blatant. Using a byte instead of a bit might have reduced program complexity. What exactly did the sender gain by sending 5k instead of 1k? And that too for a mail that did not need any formatting whatsoever. Space with repect to mail account can still be a premium. Hotmail just gives you 2Mb of space. Other web based mailer rarely go above 10MB and my previous school just gave me 25MB of space. Not really talking in GBs yet. > Rich text is easier to use than plain text. How so? How is it easier to use. I can understand it looking good but how is it easier? In fact I would have to go through extra trouble of bolding/changing text/colours etc. So there is more effort required to compose rich text. How is it easier? > Would there really be a return on the effort to implement a scheme to > switch to plaintext just because it's a two line message and the sender > didn't use bold or a bulleted list? I don't know. The problem is that these 2 line messages are much more common that the bulleted list.
