[Mimedefang] Rewarding plaintext

[Les Mikesell]

From: "David F. Skoll" <dfs at roaringpenguin.com>
>
> 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'd say 90% or better is html here if I omit program-generated messages
and open internet-mailing-lists where html is considered impolite.  The
other 10% comes from people as old as I am that learned to type
on typewriters with only one font and color.

> 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 see a lot of assorted highlighting/colors, and fine-print disclaimers added
as footers.  If you are throwing away that part you wouldn't know if it
added meaning or not.  Plus, of course, there is the default way Outlook
handles quoting which I don't think is duplicated properly in the plaintext
part.
In particular it doesn't know how to word-wrap quoted plaintext anymore.

> 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.)

This may be true in some places but it is coincidental.  Exactly the
same things that make email useful in general make it useful for
spam.  The one thing I see that may distinguish the two is that
most of the spam that includes images uses a remote URL reference
and Outlook includes the image internally in a base64-endoded
attachment.  Outlook will by default retrieve the remote images,
but evolution won't so you can easily see this when you flip though
a typical spam-filled mailbox.  We get -and want- customer support
email with attached screen shots, so we can't weight just having
images, but I don't think I've ever gotten anything I wanted that
had an html reference to a remote image.

---
  Les Mikesell
     les at futuresource.com