[pmmail-list] text/plain email

[Richard Grevers]

On Thu, 08 Aug 2002 23:11:13 -0400, Brandon King wrote:

>On Thu, 08 Aug 2002 15:53:06 -0700, Tim Roberts wrote:
>
>>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  tags.
>
>It is hardcoded into PMMail to interpret and display the html tags it
>understands whenever it comes across them. My question is, why is there
>html formatting applied to the text/plain portion of the message in the
>first place? Take for example an HTML message generated by PMMail. When
>that message is delivered, the text/plain portion of the message does
>not contain any html tags, those are appropriately placed in the
>text/html portion of the message only. The existence of tags in a
>text/plain portion sounds to me like a violation on the part of the
>sending mailer. 
>

The reason the HTML markup is in the email is that it is the subject matter the mailing list
is discussing. It is a well-behaved mailing list to which everyone posts text/plain from a 
wide range of clients. While (fortunately) most people only post fragments of code
which have problems, people occasionally need to post entire pages, and these are
the ones which PMMail users (and absolutely no one else) have problems with.
This is exactly the same as people posting HTML code examplesin text/plain messages
to newsgroups such as comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html or serving html source for people
to copy as text/plain with a txt extension (the latter for the benefit of the HTTP 1.0 violating
MSIE which ignores MIME types) from a web server.

>
>I agree. I am not sure that it can be done in PMMail 2000, but this
>will be looked at when coding the new version. If the sending mailers
>insist on placing tags into text/plain segments, it will require PMMail
>to ignore/strip those tags when the user chooses to see text/plain.

The HTML isn't put there by the sending mailer, but by the user. PMMail 
needs to display the markup because that is precisely what the readers are wanting 
to see.
It's a simple principle. Honour the MIME type first, then maybe give an option to
override that. I don't know of any other mail client that fails in this respect, so if this 
isn't fixed, I'll be on the lookout for a new mail client.

(Anyone know of other clients with PGP support, good filtering and drag and drop
between multiple accounts?)

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