[plug] HTML mail (partial flame and suggestions)

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 17:24, Cameron Patrick wrote:

> 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.

I go one better myself - MimeDefang strips it for me as it arrives at
the mail server if there's also a text/plain part. HTML mail rarely even
hits my mailbox - great if I'm using IMAP over a very slow link (as I
occasionally end up doing) where the size difference can matter.
Stripping HTML at the mail server saves me several gigs on the nightly
backup tapes too.

That, combined with the fact that modern mail clients are smart enough
to let the user choose to view the plain text part even if both are
available, makes HTML mail far less annoying to me personally.

It doesn't solve the list server side bandwidth issues mentioned by
James, nor does it address the security issues of HTML mail. I do see
the attraction of HTML mail to the sender, and it'd be interesting to
the recipient too if (a) they had a choice of whether or not to receive
it, (b) it wasn't a security risk, and (c) 90% of the people on the
Internet weren't idiots who think that 4pt yellow text on an eye-searing
green background is a good idea.

Personally, I don't care all that much for private communications,
though I think it's entirely inappropriate for mailing list traffic.

> 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.

I couldn't agree more. It becomes especially infuriating when whatever
weird font they've specified isn't availible, and the substitute is some
unreadable drek[1]. People also frequently fail to understand that a 72
to 110 dpi display is, unlike a 1200dpi laser printed page, not well
suited for 9 point type.

> 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.

<rant>
It doesn't help that most OSes have a broken idea of what "points" are
and seem to assume that the screen dpi is always 72 (?) and therefore
1pt is always a fixed number of pixels. Consequently a user of such an
OS must set a larger point size to get the desired physical on-screen
size if they work on a higher resolution display. Thankfully this
normally offsets the idiotic tendency to use 9pt text for on-screen
viewing - oh, I forgot, you print email to read it. Silly me. *foam*.
Anyway, sometimes the user may want larger fonts - and know enough to
configure larger fonts rather than the frighteningly common "solution"
of lowering the display resolution. Then I get 1cm wide type. Yay.

Points are a physical measure of size, something that OS designers seem
to fail to understand, simply not care about, or at best be unable to
reflect in their products. One point is exactly 1/12 pica, and a pica is
1/6 of an inch. Surely, therefore, if I want 11 point type I should get
type 3.88mm high, +- the variance required due to pixels. On too many
systems one instead gets a glyph <blah> pixels high, no matter how big
that ends up being on screen - something I find pathetic and endlessly
frustrating.
</rant>

Anyway, before I started discarding all HTML parts of multipart
messages, getting messages from people with wonky font settings used to
drive me to distraction. At the time the only mail client that did what
I needed insisted on displaying HTML if present, making things even
wose.

No longer - I'm now free to view my mail in monospaced or nice serif
fonts as appropriate, and at a size that suits me. As I can choose to
discard the HTML parts automatically, HTML mail no longer bothers me
that much. Most mail clients will now give the user the choice to use
plain text if both are available anyway, so that issue is considerably
reduced.

[1] It's well worth going on a "crap font purge" on a Linux system. It's
easy to get all sorts of garbage installed, and most of it achieves
nothing but irritation. There are some great top quality free fonts out
there, so there's no reason at all to resort to using some of the crap
that's available in many packages. In particular, the Vera faces really
are great for on-screen viewing (if you use them for print, I know some
people who'd like to speak to you ... in that alley out the back). 

This archive contains some brilliant quality donated fonts from URW:
ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/AFPL/GhostPCL/urwfonts-1.40.tar.bz2

Also, if you're doing any "real" printing you're well advised to get rid
of at least some of the GhostScript fonts, especially Hershey. 

--
Craig Ringer