On 27 Sep 2007, at 00:07, John Summerfield wrote:
I've never, in ten years or so of email and news groups, in Linux
and OS/2 fora, seen anyone write in support of stealing my
bandwidth or my disk space by including HTML, let along graphics,
before.
That would have been an interesting point 15 years ago, however times
have moved on considerably. Disk Space and bandwidth, which you seem
to consider precious, are now in much greater supply.
I'm pretty sure that if I measured a random sample of HTML and text
email in my inbox and extrapolated based on the last year of mail I
have in it, you'd probably be talking only a couple of hundred MB of
difference. Lets be generous and call it 1 GB... which looking at my
favourite online retailer costs about £0.15 or $0.30. I'm not sure
that's a huge problem... (even if you get 100x more mail than me)
Likewise, 1GB here or there *per year* in bandwidth costs wouldn't
send me running to refinance my house.
Apart from that, HTML constitutes a security risk, one that has in
previous days actually compromised Windows boxes. It's not for
nothing that kmail defaults to not rendering HTML.
It is /your/ problem to secure /your/ network. If you want to do so
by discarding HTML email, fine.
Do you write to every spam supplier, requesting that they stop
sending you phishing emails, links to windows viruses and various
body enhancing substances? No - you take control by blocking content
you don't want or need.
If John can't control his email client (and i find it hard to
believe he's compelled to send HTML and graphics), then he can
point out to his management that it's unpopular with people whose
help he seeks.
Well that's an interesting point, which I already addressed. It's
actually company policy in some organisations to have corporate
signatures, which sometimes have embedded images and therefore
require HTML mail, and no, Management don't care - it's part of the
brand. This is how the World works.
If you force everyone on Earth to send text-only email, then you are
imposing your preference on everyone else. If instead we all agree
that anyone can send in any format they like and anyone else can
block HTML email at delivery based on the contents (presuming of
course that you control the mail relays in your MX...) then everyone
has all the freedom they need.
All you need to do is have your relays terminate the message when
they get to the bit that says "Content-Type: text/html;"... (which in
this case would have resulted in you getting no more than you needed
as the alternate "Content-Type: text/plain;" was actually transmitted
first - but you could have taken the punitive action of dropping the
entire message as well if you felt the need to).
As I said, I wasn't intending to start a debate. I just wanted to
state that while you care if people send you HTML email, I don't and
the mailing list should reflect both sides of the coin.
--
Sam
P.S. To be a pedant, it was your choice to accept the mail, and as
such the allegation of stealing which is "taking *without consent*"
is not proven.
_______________________________________________
rhelv5-list mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
