Steven Peck wrote:
On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote:
On Wednesday 16 July 2008 4:26:38 pm Benjamin Lewis wrote:
Eric-Alexander Schaefer wrote:
Larry Garfield schrieb:
I am going to take the luddite position. Consider yourself warned. :-) Thanks (for your position, not the warning). Plaintext should be the default and HTML _could_ be an option. If HTML is used, it should contain a plaintext version. It MUST contain a plaintext version (per RFC 2119 [1])
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119 You're making the naive assumption that people actually follow that requirement. :-) LOTS of email floating about the Net, both legit and spam/trojans, contains HTML and no body. And sending the message twice (plain and HTML) is a slap in the face to anyone on low bandwidth.
-- Larry Garfield larry@garfieldtech.com
Urban legends aside, actually it is not a naive assumption, it's a valid one and the referenced RFC is a good starting point for anyone wanting to develop a valid message format. The vast majority of spam filters will in fact block as spam malformed messages. A message is considered malformed if it only has HTML content and no text component. The percentage in gross terms of malformed messages
I also hate it when I receive messages that say something like: "You need to upgrade your mail client to see HTML messages" That is not, imho, a good enough text component and it would be really good if this could _also_ be avoided.
(particularly deliberate spam) is fairly low to the overall percentage of email. We block approximately 85-90% of the incoming email where I work as spam and of that 85-90% less than 2% is triggered as malformed. It is a mid-sized environment with about 30 million messages in the last month. In the early days of spam (where simple word filters roamed free as the tool of choice), malformed messages were not tested for and as a result spammers used that technique for a while.
Exactly, so it is absolutely paramount that we output well-formed messages.
While sending HTML messages is in fact harder on low bandwidth recipients, HTML messages are a fact of life and there is a portion of a given customer base that does in fact want to use it.
-- Benjamin Lewis Fedora Ambassador ben.lewis@benl.co.uk ----------------------------------------------------------------------- http://benl.co.uk./ PGP Key: 0x647E480C "In cases of major discrepancy, it is always reality that got it wrong" -- RFC 1118