On Mon, 15 May 2000, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
tytso> I wonder how many people are still using plain-text,
tytso> non-HTML enabled mail readers? It still happens on some
tytso> mailing list, where someone will send a base-64 encoded
tytso> html'ified message (usually using MS Outlook), and someone
tytso> will send back "try again in English; I don't read that MIME
tytso> crap."
Just a quick survey on the last 513 messages seen in the IETF list, based
on X-Mailer header:
1 Allaire
1 CrossPoint
1 dtmail
1 Eudora
1 KMail
1 Lotus
1 Netscape (Messenger Express)
1 Posta (Posta elettronica Internet di Microsoft/MAPI - 8.0.0.4211)
2 Mew
2 Mulberry/2.0.0
5 Mutt
5 VM
5 Windows (Eudora Pro)
25 ELM
29 exmh
28 Pine (based on Message-ID strings)
34 QUALCOMM (later versions of Eudora)
37 Internet (Internet Mail Service, another Microsoftism)
52 Microsoft (Outlook)
54 Mozilla
Most of these do natively understand HTML email to a certain extent, or
can be configured to pass HTML email to an outside viewer, and a small
number send HTML email by default (based on personal experience). I don't
know of any in the above list that cannot be convinced to send plain text.
Please remember that the capabilities of a given client are different from
the (possibly bad in some cases) defaults set by the distributers/authors
of a given client. Perhaps the focus should be on the defaults, rather
than blindly saying ``Mailer X is bad.''
--==--
Bruce.
Sysadmin, APNIC