[Mimedefang] Rewarding plaintext

[David F. Skoll]

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, Kelson Vibber wrote:

[Some good points cut out]

> Maybe HTML mail is doomed - if it gets us something new that's open
> and serves the same purpose without being vulnerable to the problems
> full HTML support has, that's a good thing.  But I can't convince
> myself the future of email is 100% plain text, and I can't convince
> myself that it should be.

OK.

Do a little survey.  Take all of the mail you receive.  Throw out spam and
viruses so you're left with legitimate e-mail.

Now throw away mail that's only plain text, so you're left with legitimate
mail in HTML format.

Now count how many of those legitimate HTML e-mail actually make use
of HTML formatting.  In my experience, it's a tiny, tiny minority.
Most HTML e-mail comes from e-mail programs that automatically compose
a multipart/alternative message with text/plain and text/html parts.
Almost no-one actually uses HTML formatting in e-mail, except for
spammers and marketers.

I almost never receive HTML e-mail.  Anyone sending HTML mail to me gets
a bounce unless "roaringpenguin.com" appears in the To: or Cc: header,
or the sender is a known mailing list.  That knocks out a handful of messages
a day, all of which are spam as far as I can determine.

Next, if multipart/alternative messages come in, I drop any text/html
parts.  That means someone wanting to send me HTML would need to compose
an HTML-only mail and make sure I appear in To: or Cc:.  Almost no-one
does that.

As far as I can tell, I'm not missing anything.

The dubious benefits of HTML (formatted e-mail, colors, images, etc.)
are simply not worth the cost (a terrific vehicle for spammers to evade
content scanning.)

Regards,

David.