Alister Waller said something along the lines of:
> I have now switched to plain text.
Hooray! :)
> Can I ask why people use non-html enabled mail clients?? What is the benefit
> of this? Is this a linux geeky type thing??
Matt Elkins, the original author of mutt (the email client I use) quotes
himself on the mutt.org homepage:
"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."
Mutt happens to suck a lot less than most text-based mail clients, and
supports - nay, *handles* the multipart annoyances that are the default on
most GUI mailers (especially the ones from our friends, Microsoft, who come
up with brilliant new ways to obfuscate what really amounts to *plain text*
with every revision of their various mail clients).
When I receive HTML email, mutt invokes w3m to render it. When I receive
that tdif junk, mutt fixes it up to show me the plain text part only.
> Seems strange when you look at what computers are capable of that a minority
> (I am taking a stab in the virtual darkness) still insist on using a text
> based mail reader.
Not so sure about a minority. I think you'll find the fetchmail / procmail /
mutt trio on a lot of our desktops. I'd recommend looking at the User-Agent
and X-Mailer headers, but that's a couple of clicks away in your client. :D
If you use a GUI mailer exclusively, you don't get the benefit of ssh'ing
into your machine to read your email as if you were at your desktop... and
don't be telling me you'd do it over X! ;)
> You mention bandwith, I am sure a lot of you download
> pictures and Mpeg 3's etc which hog a lot more of that than a few extra
> lines of text in an email.
When it comes to you or I, sure, that bandwidth isn't a problem. However,
there are 464-- 465 people on the mailing list...
Taking a random tnef email on the list, the text/plain version was 0.5k,
however the tnef junk was an additional 2.4k, so the email is about six
times the size of what it needed to be. Take that 2.4k and multiply it by
465, and you have just under a megabyte, never mind the overhead.
Then there's the Pine users, but we won't go into that. :D
- Jeff
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