[plug] HTML mail (partial flame and suggestions)

[Cameron Patrick]

Tim White wrote:

> I have seen people recently being asked not to send HTML mail. This 
> email is to ask a few questions and give a few suggestions.
> Firstly, if a person sends an email in MIME format with a test part and 
> HTML part, why shouldn't this be allowed? As far as I know most text 
> based email clients are MIME compliant and the message is normally sent 
> text part first so it's not like they need to scroll down past lots of 
> html to see it. (As I don't use a text based client I could be wrong so 
> please correct me.)

I use mutt and it will use the text/plain part if it is there, and
pipe the message through lynx to convert it to text if it is
HTML-only.  I believe Pine does something similar.  So I don't really
mind HTML mail.

When I use a graphical mail client, though, I find HTML mail rude as
it renders more slowly and often in garish colours and fonts which the
author happened to like.  Especially annoying is when I see bright
blue text with the font size set to two sizes smaller than the
default.  The default is quite large on some clients, such as Outlook,
but I tend to have it set to a smaller size -- and when an e-mail
specifies a smaller size again, it makes it harder for me to read.

Complaints that I have heard from other people include that it wastes
bandwidth.  This is especially relevant on list mail because the list
server has to send out 300-odd copies of the message, and also when
sending to people who have to pay per-megabyte for their bandwidth --
IIRC James Devenish is in this category.

Cameron.