Questions for PMMail Tech Support

[Gregory L. Marx]

On Wed, 13 Sep 2000 10:01:07 +0100 (BST), Simon Bowring wrote:

>>> 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
>

Wow ...

Never thought of it in this way ...

I just posted a message saying maybe it's time to ignore the text only stance ...

I think I just changed my mind again ...

:-)

Thanks very much Simon for your insight !!!