From: Benjamin Geer <ben(_at_)socialtools(_dot_)net>
I'm sure there are legitimate uses of HTML mail, but I cannot remember
ever receiving one.
I maintain a number of mailing lists which the members of various
(non-technical) organizations use to communicate with each other. The
volume of legitimate HTML email on these lists is quite high.
Is it high because those people use bold, italic, and so forth or
because their MUAs send in HTML by default and they are not savvy
enough to fix that problem?
Programmers and sysadmins, and people who started using email before MIME
was introduced, tend to dislike HTML email.
There is some truth to that, but it is overstated.
Other people see the ability to
use boldface and italics as normal features of any text-editing environment
(which they consider their MUA to be).
That is also true, but overstated. The vast majority of email is too
informal to have spell checking except where it is automatic (and I
doubt most users bother to turn it on). People can almost never
(statistically) be bothered to notice typos confounding "you're" with
"your", and use bold and italics even less often. However, that
implies nothing about not having reasonable text formating (not
"editing") facilities when you want them.
They would find the idea of
suppressing those features simply bizarre. When writing a document that is
going to be printed, whether we use Microsoft Word or LaTeX, we can put the
title of a book in italics; people have come to expect that the same is true
when they write email.
What I find bizzare is the persistent equating of turning off HTML by
default with banning HTML. Those responses make me wonder if I've
not been paying enough attention. Is HTML mail being summarily rejected
by ISPs and commercial mail gateways?
Given facts of life including spam and web bugs, why would that be
worse than filtering mail with large attachments due to facts of life
including worms?
As for attachments, nowadays, many people have digital cameras and
high-speed Internet connections, and like to send photos to their friends
via email. It is no use telling these people that 'sending large attachments
is poor netiquette'; they and their friends have the requisite bandwidth,
and it doesn't bother them.
That misrepresents the advice. It is in fact poor netiquette to send
large attachments without knowing your targets want and can handle
them. Once you know, there's no problem.
Are you advocating a right to send HTML or MByte attachments to perfect
strangers? Why didn't you send your message in HTML, perhaps with a
picture of your significant other, house, new baby, car, or something
else close to your heart?
My own view is that these issues are red herrings. Spam is spam whether it
consists of an ASCII text file or a JPEG. Effective anti-spam measures
should stop spam regardless of its format.
Yes, but equating not sending attachments without knowing your
correspondents want them with banning attachments or not using HTML to
send simply ASCII mail to banning HTML is a worse red herring.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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