On Sunday, Jun 22, 2003, at 13:17 US/Eastern, Vernon Schryver wrote:
mathew <meta(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com>:
...
Yes, but it's also totally outside the purview of the ASRG, unless you
think it is in some way an important enabler of spam.
I wholeheartedly agree that unnecessary use of HTML in e-mail is
stupid. I completely concur that HTML e-mail is generally a waste of
bandwidth. However, as far as I can see these arguments over how
technically awful HTML e-mail is are irrelevant to this list, because
it's not going away and even if it did spam would just go back to
being
plain text.
(In fact, all the spam that's made it through my filters this week has
been plain text.)
How much HTML spam did your filters reject before it got to your
mailbox?
I don't know how much was rejected because it was HTML; I use
SpamAssassin, and the HTML-ness is just one of many factors it weighs.
If HTML vs. spam spam is off-topic here, then so are all other
anti-spam
mechanisms that allow mail among strangers. They are all much less
then perfect and so by your criteria must be off topic:
I did not say that anti-spam mechanisms which are imperfect are
off-topic. I said that HTML e-mail is not necessary for spam to exist,
and that rich text e-mail is not going to go away.
Hence all your paragraphs of things which "must be off topic" are
irrelevant straw-man examples.
Of course it is silly to talk about ISPs or any large organizations
filtering HTML by default.
I'm glad you agree with me on that.
That does not imply that it would not be good and profitable to
write a BCP saying (among many other things):
Filtering HTML mail from strangers is an effect spam defense and
should be considered a 1%-10% false positive rate can be tolerated.
Because some individuals and organizations do filter HTML mail
from strangers, you SHOULD NOT send HTML or mail involving
unnecessary MIME attachments to strangers. Like any and all spam
defenses that allow mail from strangers, filtering HTML mail is
only partially effective.
I'm pretty sure nobody on the list is going to disagree with that
either.
For base64 and quoted-printable--again, how do you expect people in
China to talk to each other if don't allow them to encode their
language
in what is still fundamentally a 7-bit ASCII, ANSI x3.-4, transport,
where ASCII stands for "American standard for character information
interchange" and does not even allow the English to talk about their
money?
Yet another good reason why HTML and base64 aren't going away.
mathew
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