[Mimedefang] Rewarding plaintext

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, David F. Skoll wrote:

> On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, Kelson Vibber wrote:
>
> > 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.

Anybody hear about text/enriched ?  It seems to meet those criteria fairly
well.

> Do a little survey [...]
>
> 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.

I do not believe that I've ever recieved a legitimate message of type
text/html or multipart/alternative in which the HTML demostrated its value
to communication.  Of course I've received useful HTML attachments, but
that is different.

> 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.)

Again for those who want colors and font styles, etc, text/enriched would
do the job (but no images).

Many MUAs will render text/enriched fine, but few (the mailer inside emacs
is an acception) have well integrate ways of generating it.

-j

-- 
Jeffrey Goldberg                            http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
 Relativism is the triumph of convention over truth, authority over justice
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