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

[Davide Mirtillo]

Il 09/05/2011 11:25, adept techlists - kazar ha scritto:
> 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

There are loads of reasons why HTML messages are not good for mailing
lists. See [0] for some examples. There's also an rfc about messaging
which i think would be pretty interesting for some of the members of
this mailing list [1].

Simply saying "omg it's 2011, get an html e-mail client!1!!!!!" is not
an answer, because it's not a logic argument, and i could just reply on
the same line: "omg it's 2011, learn to configure your e-mail client
properly!".

HTML emails sent to mailing lists are just plain rude, IMO. It's even
worse when there's people asking you to switch to plain text messages.

[0] http://pyropus.ca/personal/writings/nomime.html
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855

-- 
Davide Mirtillo