[support] HTML e-mail (was Re: Chaos Tool installation problem)

[adept techlists - kazar]

sivaji j.g wrote:
> Please refrain from sending HTML e-mail to lists. It is not
> *recommended*,  often discouraging to read your reply though it is
> valuable. I hope the list moderators will look into it (if anyone
> around).
This is a losing battle. If mailing lists are offered as support forums 
for the public, it must be recognized that many, if not most, email 
programs by default send html or rtf emails, or they are using web email 
such as gmail or yahoo that have prominent formatting buttons and 
actually encourage formatted emails. And end-users are largely unaware 
of what the differences are, and how to create a plain-text email, and 
should not have to study up on this to discuss things with a community.

I used to be a heavy-duty plain-text email evangelist. I gave up on this 
sort of purist approach maybe 10 years ago, when I got tired of dealing 
with my clients sending me inline responses to my questions with notes 
such as "my responses are in blue". I switched to an html-capable email 
client (T'bird, now Postbox) and have never looked back.

Anyway, the person you chose to pick on does use Yahoo mail which can be 
determined by exposing the full headers of her messages and looking at 
the X-Mailer value, and she did NOT send an html email, it was sent as 
Content-Type: multipart/mixed ... which is actually the de facto 
standard for a long time now. If your email app has trouble displaying 
the plain-text portion of a multipart/mixed message, maybe look around 
at other email programs.

kazar