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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Neil Williams wrote: > > 1. Bloat. HTML is necessarily at least twice the size of the same plain text > email. Especially if it inserts a plain text version for people without HTML capable clients! This is a particularly daft behaviour, either the HTML version adds something, in which case don't lose that by automatically converting to text, or it doesn't so why send it in HTML in the first place? > 2. Most people delete HTML email - it's commonly spam > 3. Because of 2, a lot of people thoroughly distrust HTML email and nothing > anyone can say will change that > 4. Most people here are not Windows users so it isn't a direct threat to > security but HTML email still has that reputation (and rightly so). I disagree, I would suggest that HTML mail exercises sufficiently extra ways through the code that it presents a significantly increased threat to security on all major platforms. Linux mail clients aren't magically exempt from security problems. They may be better engineered, and better supported <sic>, and the OS may provide some extra protection, than the most exploited mail client and OS(es), but all it takes is one buffer overflow (at least on most platforms). Why do you think Kmail does that text only view of HTML? Call it defensive coding. > 5. This is a forum for discussion not presentation. > 6. KISS - HTML emails break horribly when someone replies in plain text. > 7. It's established policy from a series of threads over the years. 8. Problems with quoting (many common mailers can't correctly handle quoting HTML mail - mentioning no vendors - so it tend to head towards "top posting" - yuk). 9. Problems with digest formats - most mailing lists offer digest format, some offer digest and allow HTML - argh (You'd think NANOG would know better). 10. Allows cross site scripting attack against mailing list archives... that security thing again... although hopefully Neil is on top of this one. 11. Many mail clients produce lousy mark-up so it may not look like you expect. I routinely get an email from a web design company, whose marketing newsletter uses a 'Windows only' font in the HTML(? M$ML?), so the apostrophes are toast, they won't ever be designing my website, this somewhat defeats their marketing goal. > email clients usually do the colour thing for replies and quote levels. If you > want to emphasise something, use smilies or underline it like this. > **************** Yuk, it'll never line up, stop assuming things about the readers system. If you must assume something, assume it has been Babelfished into German and then converted into braille on a braille display that shows one line at a time, or sent to a mobile phone, or both. Smilies? Well I like smilies, but probably the exclamation mark is better style! ¡Ola! The Spanish win here, marking the emphasis at the correct place in the sentence (especially when reading to other people), and marking where it ends. ¿ Perhaps we should copy their punctuation, at least in this respect? I'm *sure* between *us* we can find other ways of *emphasising* stuff ;) >>Sorry if that was a problem but I thought everyone would be using >>software that would cope with that. > > The software can handle it, the users prefer not to have it rammed down their > inbox. > > :-) Since I switched to whitelisting (challenge/response) I stopped filtering unexpected HTML mail straight to the probably spam bucket (Rick has the dubious honour of being the only false positive), but I reserve the right to change my mind. All the mail clients I use regularly support HTML, excepting mailx but I'd be damn annoyed if you managed to send mail to those systems, given the firewalling, and the lack of an SMTP daemon ;) Simon -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQE/d4cWGFXfHI9FVgYRApB4AJwOGgIBEaPXmxlaiuRDoe/re4X4oACbBy5+ QA5GLhSZiShQpKiVFOf00DQ= =GlZ/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.