[pmmail-list] text/plain email

Thu, 08 Aug 2002 15:53:06 -0700

On Fri, 09 Aug 2002 10:18:51 +1200, Richard Grevers wrote:

>On Thu, 08 Aug 2002 15:00:07 -0700, Tim Roberts wrote:
>
>>Although I agree wholeheartedly that this behavior is misguided and annoying, 
>>and violates the "principle of least astonishment", there are in fact no RFCs 
>>that mandate the physical rendering of a piece of e-mail.  An MUA is 
>>essentially free (from an RFC standpoint) to interpret the contents as it
>>sees fit.
>
>text/plain is pretty clearly defined as "unformatted" in RFC 1521
>http://www.nacs.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/MIME/1521/07_Predefined_Content-Type.html#
7.1

Yes, I looked it up before I sent my original response.  It says that "no 
special software is REQUIRED to get the full meaning" (emphasis mine) of a 
text/plain part, but it really says nothing about how it must be rendered, and 
it fact it cannot do so.  One mailer might display it in fixed-pitch Courier, 
while another displays it in proportional Times Roman with double-spacing.  
That has to be allowed.  Many mailers (including PMMail) look for and highlight 
things that look like URLs and e-mail addresses.  That's not prohibited, and 
neither is interpreting embedded <HTML> tags.

I still hate it.

--
- Tim Roberts, timr@probo.com
  Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

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