On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 6:43 PM, Aaron <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>TW, is anybody using a mail reader that can't handle HTML-formatted
>text?
Yes. Regularly. HTML-formatted mail is one of the dumber developments to
come along, as far as I am concerned.
>And what's so good about "the good old-fashioned email
>standards"?
I would not say that is it so much that "good old-fashioned email" is
better, but that it is simpler and therefore less prone to problems. First,
HTML mail takes more disk space than "good old-fashioned email". In many
cases I have seen HTML mail taking over twice that of regular e-mail. This
may not be a big deal for some, but when you deal with a very large volume
of mail, this is indeed a real issue. I dare say doubling the size of
e-mail archives is not a popular idea with many folks.
Secondly, HTML mail has security holes that are much more serious than
plain e-mail. The sender of HTML mail can embed all sorts of little goodies
into a letter besides a simple hello. Via HTML mail one can send viruses,
Trojan horses and track the actions of the recipient. The sender can embed
things such as a URL or Java code and these little gems can be used for all
sorts of things.
In the case of a URL, embedded URLs can be used in spamming to track the
actions of the targeted e-mail accounts. This latter reason is one reason
why a good deal of spam comes wrapped up in html. For example, if the
spammer sends an html e-mail, he can embed URL's back to his server that
will track if the spam is opened etc. Likewise Java Code can be embeded. In
this case the sender has considerable freedom to execute a program he wrote
on the targeted machine.
As to word wrapping in e-mail, no offense folks, but are some of you
complainers for real? Perhaps you need a good text editor. Perhaps you need
a better e-mailer. Perhaps you should reconsider how much you need to
quote.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Martin
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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