From: Benjamin Geer <ben(_at_)socialtools(_dot_)net>
OK, here are counts of non-spam messages from a list for people working on a
non-technical political campaign, for four months that had particularly high
traffic (September, October and December 2002, and January 2003).
Total messages: 144
Plain text (including quoted-printable): 94
Total HTML: 48
'Unnecessary' HTML (just P and DIV tags): 23
'Useful' HTML (e.g. with bold and italic, and different font sizes): 25
Entire message in base64: 2
Messages (among the above) with attachments: 4
I included quoted-printable in the plain-text category because it was needed
by several people posting messages in languages other than English.
The archives are here:
http://lists.southspace.net/pipermail/esf-uk-info
Thanks!
So by your count, 25/144 or 17% involved real HTML?
That's more than I predicted, but less than it seemed others suggested.
Not to be difficult, just to see if I agreed, I looked at October, 2002
Of the 42 total (if I counted right), I found 6 that had real HTML
formatting. Three of those were what might be called formal presentation
documents intended for bulk distribution (e.g. seminar timetables)
instead of person-to-person or person-to-mailing-list email. Was that
month unusual or did I count wrong? 3/39 or 8% is above my prediction
but significantly below 17%. Do you agree that documents such
as the seminar timetables aren't strictly admissible? I certainly
agree that HTML is appropriate for those documents, but they're also
legitimate bulk mail that should be subject to white-listing.
Many of the real HTML messages included plaintext versions.
How do you suppose their authors would have responded if it were
suggested that HTML was a bad idea?
It should be noted that the Mailman archive of that list might have
discouraged the use of HTML. The ugliness of HTML in that vintage of
Mailman archives is one of the reasons why I've configured Mailman to
reject HTML submissions to the DCC mailing lists.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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