HTML in emails

[Charles Lindsey]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:02:09 +0100, Ian Batten <igb@batten.eu.org> wrote:

> 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:

Any decent browser will show links in the txt version of an email in  
clickable form. You don't need HTML.

My normal presumption is that people who routinely use  
multipart/alternative are clueless newbies who accept microsoft default  
configurations as having been handed down from Mount Sinai. I would have  
hoped that you would have known better.

> 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.

You would do better to compare the size of the HTML and TXT versions of  
the same message. The incredible bloat introduced by some un-nameable  
browsers is hard to credit, but the ratio of HTML directives to meaningful  
text is typically around 5:1. I don't see why I should be obliged to waste  
my disc space on mail archives which tell me, often for every line in a  
message, which fancy font, point size and pretty colour they want me to  
display it in.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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