[Mimedefang] Rewarding plaintext

[David F. Skoll]

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, Kelson Vibber wrote:

> If this ever does happen, I can guarantee you that someone will come up
> with another way to add formatting to email.

There are a plethora of other ways.  (PDF, etc.)

> Why?  Because it's not e-telegram, it's e-MAIL.

The analogy is imprecise.  I don't expect e-mail to behave like
regular mail -- I can't e-mail my sister a present, and I don't expect
e-mail to take several days to reach the intended recipient (though it
sometimes does...)

Phone companies sell a feature called "voice mail".  Just because it's
called "mail" doesn't mean it necessarily bears any relationship
to postal mail.

> It's (relatively) easy to convince people that sending .exe files is the
> digital equivalent of sending explosives through the mail.  It's hard to
> convince them that sending their message in blue 15-point Tahoma is the same.

Sending blue 15-point Tahoma is not the main problem.  HTML enables
spammers to disguise content.  It also enables a plethora of security
problems (scripting, the Outlook iframe exploit, etc.)

> But if the choice is PDF, Word, HTML or Outlook, I'll take the HTML.

What I'm saying is that pretty soon, the choice will be plain text or
nothing at all.  Spammers and security issues will move corporations
in that direction, and once a critical mass of corporations have
moved, others will be forced to move, or forced to treat e-mail as
unreliable.  I won't be particularly disturbed when that day arrives.

Regards,

David.