[plug] HTML mail (partial flame and suggestions)

[Tim White]

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.) If it really bugs some people then they can set up a 
filter to pipe all emails through a html2txt program and not have to 
worry again. (Not trying to flame people, I my self have been restricted 
to shell access of emails before[1])

Secondaly could new subscribers be sent an email stating the acceptance 
or dislike of HTMl mail at the start with tips of how to turn it off for 
the common email clients (Mac, Win, and Linux)
For those of you who want to send HTML emails normally (like I do to 
hotmail recipients,) and you are using Thunderbird (I seem to remember 
that you can do this in Outlook as well,) read on.
In thunderbird you can set the prefered email format on a domain bases. 
This means that your HTML email is sent in HTML to hotmail, yahoo, etc 
domains while emails you send to plug and other mailing lists can be 
sent in plain text.
Under Tools -> Options -> Composition -> Send Options, you will find a 
box to list HTML domains and Plain text domains. Under plain text domain 
add plug.linux.org.au and all you plug emails sent from you will 
automatically be sent in plain text.

Tim

[1] It was actually pure telnet into the POP3 server and manually 
retrieve messages with those /easy/ to remember pop commands.