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

[Davide Mirtillo]

Il 09/05/2011 15:37, Ms. Nancy Wichmann ha scritto:
> Interesting, Davide, because your email arrived in HTML format.

Did it? I'm pretty sure i sent it in plain text. Can you forward me
(privately) the headers so i can have a look?

> Frankly, I think the prefernce is primarily a matter of opinion. I prefer to 
> receinve the message with the formatting that the author intended. 

Well yeah, you can read the message the way the "author" formatted it,
but i'd rather not. Most people are not typographers and/or have really
poor taste/ability in formatting text.

> Further, when 
> one sends links (as you did), I like to be able to just click, rather than copy, 
> open a window, and paste.

All of the clients i've used so far are turning links into clickable
ones for plain text mails. Same with email addresses in the text. It's a
really basic feature for a GUI client.

> Further, I prefer it when one edits the email to which one is responding so that 
> I don't have to re-read through the whole thread again.

That is also one of the reasons why "top posting" is a bad idea, it
makes the conversation really hard to follow for somebody that did not
read all of the previous mails in the thread, for example (imagine
people browsing the archives). Trimming the mail is actually a really
good idea, though.

> But then I also prefer GUIs to CLI. I guess I'm just old fashioned. ;-)

I'm not using a cli either, my desktop client is Thunderbird, so i can
read HTML mails just fine. Can't say the same about my mobile client,
though: HTML mails are often a pain to read on devices with a small screen.

Anyway, it's just a matter of preference. Some people prefer richer text
formats, at the expense of compatibility and accessibility of messages
with different clients. Some other people like you will be nice and
smart enough to comply with formatting requests coming from other list
users, but this doesn't happen every time - unless the list manager
forces users to do so.

-- 
Davide Mirtillo