Questions for PMMail Tech Support

[Simon Bowring]

>> PMMail for OS/2 was designed, on purpose, to rip html out of email.  I,
>> for one, want PMMail to continue working that way.  Email should be
>> plain text, period, except for attachments.
>
>I prefer that behavior also.  :)

Indeed - there is no other acceptable behaviour - the fault is that some
mailers think they are HTML editors, when they are not. [You already
have a multi megabyte HTML renderer and editor in IE or NS, now you want 
two?]

HTML email is without any doubt the most badly conceived feature ever 
built into any email s/w and was only done by NS and MS as part of their 
"arms race" to win the web broswer monopoly wars. It's yet another triumph 
of form over function that attempts to win market share by providing
waht appears to be a feature with "sex appeal", but actually abandons,
misuses and perverts internet standards to the detriment of email 
interoperability and therefore to the detriment of all email users.
Adding HTML to email clients was an act of ignorance or wanton contempt 
for end-users who have every right to expect all half decent email 
clients to interwork correctyl.

Sadly many people on this list have "fallen for it", along with the bulk 
of the millions of Windows users who cannot be expected to know any 
better.

Believe me, blueprint cannot afford to develop an HTML 4.0 rendering
engine in their email client - it's several man-years effort and just 
developing the engine is only the beginning, you then have to decide 
what to do about all the facilities that web browers have that don't 
make sense in email, and there are no rules or standards about this, 
so you end up with email clients from different vendors that behave 
differently, display the mail differently (and the very significant 
additional complexity will cause extra bugs and crashes which malicious
people can and do expoit to crash your system and infect it with
viruses).

Bloatware killed the (office) applications market and MS have done
their best to kill the email cleint market too - small companies like 
blueprint cannot compete with this strategy, especially if end-users 
are stupid or ignorant enough to by into it.

Simon