Why this phobia to HTML mail?

[Steve Lamb]

On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 11:28:53AM +0100, Simon Bowring wrote:
> It's obviously quite acceptable to mail HTML or PDF files etc amongst 
> "consenting adults", but the problem is that mailers default to 
> this non-standard inappropriate behaviour, so most users have no 
> idea that they are doing things "wrong", or that recipients 
> won't necessarily see what the sender intended, or that recipients
> may even have trouble interpretting the message at all, or that
> the sender may be helping to propagate viruses around the internet!

    To put some real world anecdotes to this my roommate just got a new job at
a new company.  She can't figure out why all her mail is being sent out in
HTML even though she swears she has it set to plain text.  TB! can read the
html fine but doesn't quote it.  There doesn't appear to be a plain text
version of the message coming through.  When I am reading mail in mutt like I
am now to read her messages I need to toss everything into lynx.  As a result
I can't quote on mutt, either.  Kinda silly, innit?

> Again: HTML mail is NOT the answer to how to get rich text markup 
> into email. There currently isn't a good standards based answer.
> The best is the "defacto" standard markup that Steve's always talking 
> about. Some mailers actually interpret *bold* and _underlined_ and 
> /italic/ text etc, which is quite a nice feature (as long as it 
> can be easily toggled on and off) [Feature request, Trevor!].

    Screw it, I think from now on I'm going to compose all my email in TeX.
It is a markup language that is used for typesetting books.  Clearly that will
get my intent across, right?  How about it, you with me?

-- 
         Steve C. Lamb         | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
         ICQ: 5107343          | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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