HTML in emails

[Ian Batten]

On 26 Sep 08, at 0920, Mr Ellis Weinberger wrote:

> Could colleagues consider turning off the HTML in their emails?

Why?  If I want to send something with links in it, I send in  
multipart/alternative with the first portion in text/plain and the  
second portion in text/html.  Someone reading this in a mail reader  
which does not understand MIME will see an extraneous:

> --Apple-Mail-21--708680382
> Content-Type: text/plain;
> 	charset=US-ASCII;
> 	format=flowed;
> 	delsp=yes
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

at the top, and will presumably stop reading once the HTML starts.   
Someone using a mail reader which does not understand HTML (or whose  
user does not wish to see HTML) but which does understand MIME will  
see the plain text version.  The remaining constituencies will see the  
HTML version.

If your complaint is against people who send email in text/html, I'm  
on the barricades with you, brother.  But in 2008, I really cannot see  
the slightest reason why multipart/alternative with text/plain as the  
first component is unacceptable.  It's standardised, there are tools  
available for every conceivable platform, and RFC1521 is fifteen years  
old.  Short of ``oh, it looks a bit ugly when I read my mail with /usr/ 
ucb/mail'', it's hard to see an argument.

By a strange co-incidence, I was comparing the size of the header with  
the size of the body in some ukcrypto postings last night.  It's  
routine for the header to be more than twice the size of the body by  
the time it arrives in my Cyrus instance.  That some items of mail  
replicate the content seems a minor crime, especially as I doubt if  
cam.ac.uk is short of bandwidth.

But if we want to agree that ukcrypto is plain text only, let's do  
it.  But it seems that fighting the pointless battles of the 1990s  
again is pretty futile.

ian