On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 08:56:16AM -0400, Mark H. Wood wrote: > Two cultures in contact, which do not share customs and manners, can > disengage; they can fight; or they can agree on protocols that they > *will* share, even though the protocols make no sense *within* either > culture. > > So how can the flat-text and rich-text and all-up-graphics cultures > play nicely together, with nobody surrendering and being subjugated by > anybody else?
The conventional, mutually acceptable approach has, for years, been as follows: - People who prefer to send plain text emails, or plain text emails with attachments intended to be viewed in software other than the MUA, continue to do so, because this approach is compatible with just about every extant MUA in the world. - People who prefer to send rich-text emails do so as multi-part messages that include a plain text part. (The latter is typically generated automatically from the rich text part by the sender's MUA; e.g. translated from HTML into Markdown, so that *emphasis* makes it through to the plain text version.) For maximum compatibility, no part/attachments should require the recipient's MUA to parse HTML or other files into a graphical representation, because not all MUAs can do this. The difficulty experienced by Derek, IIUC, and also by other people on this list, is that some people in the second culture have stopped following the convention above, and have instead begun sending emails that are compatible only with a restricted subset of not-very-secure MUAs. I realise that in many cases, the people in the second culture who have started doing that have done so unwittingly. For instance, because the developers of their MUA changed the MUA's behaviour so that it no longer sends emails that are compatible with traditional MUAs. (Not by default, anyway, and maybe not at all.) One or more variants of Outlook seem to be particularly at fault here. But the emails those people send are of limited compatibility nonetheless, and cannot be viewed as intended without an increased risk of exposure to spyware/malware. For these reasons, the new behaviour is (in my view) inconsiderate. (Insofar as this shift away from compatibility has been caused by corporate software developers, it is reminiscent of General Motors tearing up the streetcar tracks that they had acquired - "People have cars now. They won't need these old things anymore!" - with little care for people who depended upon streetcars for transportation. Or, to use my other analogy, it would be like a handful of maintenance corporations sending workers to their clients' buildings, unbidden, to remove the wheelchair ramps: "Ramps? They're so last century. Everyone should be using an app!") What's the solution to this inconsiderateness? The first response should be to notify the sender. If the sender fails to correct their (or their MUA's) behaviour to bring it back into universal compatibility, then they should be asked again. If they still fail, then they should be treated as the recipient would treat any other antisocial lout, e.g. given a wide berth. Additionally, if the recipient has a disability and the sender's inconsiderate behaviour renders the sender's emails inaccessible to the recipient (even though the recipient can read compatible emails just fine), then the recipient might, in some jurisdictions, be able to bring a legal case against the sender. (IANAL.) This emphasises the closeness of my second analogy above, about the ramps. -- A: When it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: When is top-posting a bad thing? () ASCII ribbon campaign. Please avoid HTML emails & proprietary /\ file formats. (Why? See e.g. https://v.gd/jrmGbS ). Thank you.
