HTML in emails

[Derek Fawcus]

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 09:20:32AM +0100, Mr Ellis Weinberger wrote:
> Could colleagues consider turning off the HTML in their emails?

While HTML email bugs me - especially when it has no plain text part
accompanying it,  the main reason is due to the poor quality of the
sending mail apps.

This seems to mainly be bugs in MS Entorage and Exchange/Outlook in
how 'smart quotes' are handled,  together with declaring charset.

If one checks the text/html part one will often see the correct unicode
codepoint declared,  however the incorrect character code is generated
in the text/plain part.

These text/plain parts almost always claim to be ISO-8859-1,  however
sometimes they are really windows-1252 (or is that 1251?),  sometimes
an encoding I've not managed to figure out.

It'd be a lot easier if the text/plain was simply sent as utf-8,
at least then they're less likely to trigger bugs as no charset
recoding would be required in the sending app.

The other bit which is annonying is the poor rending of the formatted
text to plain text - lists (<li>) which get wrapped at the wrong
point.  Random libe breaks etc.  The introduction of format=flowed
was not supposed to be a licence for poor rending at the sending end.

If multipart/alternative html and plain is being sent,  the plain should
have good formatting.

I've just given up,  and now accept email sent from these clients will
often contain junk in the text/plain part,  and be difficult to read.

DF