[pmmail-list] hyper-text?

[Brandon King]

On Wed, 24 Jul 2002 21:08:11 -0500 (CDT), John Thompson wrote:

>One word: "bandwidth"
>Another word: "security"

One more term: "client/customer relations"

This applies to both customers of BSW and to their customers. Much to my
dismay, HTML has become a fact of life in email. Yes, 99% of HTML messages most
of us receive are spam. But we cannot ignore that other, sometimes vital, 1%. I
receive quite a few messages to the support address from PMMail customers who
are ready to give up on PMMail because their clients/customers prefer and
insist on using HTML email clients. When it comes down to it, there is no
stronger argument than this for us to improve HTML support within PMMail. No,
we are not going to turn PMMail into another WYSIWYG editor that sends email,
but we do want to give the user the option to interpret and display HTML
messages that they receive the way it was intended. 

As I have mentioned before in a post several months back (5/8 & 5/28) full HTML
support will not be available in PMMail 2000 due to limitations of the source
code. I think Peter made changes today to the MIME content handling that will
alleviate some of the odd renderings of simple HTML messages. You will not, to
my knowledge, see support for inline content (images, video, etc.) or for that
matter, you won't see much past basic text, font, color and alignment tags in
PMMail 2000.

The first concern I see is balancing support for HTML with security concerns.
Once we have made a final release of PMMail 2000 and Peter begins to use the
wxWindows interface and tools, we will know more about how HTML will be
implemented in the next version, but this is still at least a month or two
away. It looks like the beta released this week (likely v2.30 due to the number
of changes/fixes) will be the final beta for PMMail 2000 and the next release
will be the final build of PMMail 2000. This of course is barring any
unforeseen issues with the builds.  

Just a little heads up for those interested, we do plan on conducting a private
beta of the new code beginning in the early fall. We are still working out the
details of how this will be conducted, but I hope that many of you that have
contributed to this list will lend your experience and time to help us test the
new version (Windows). This is only an FYI at this point, I will be making an
announcement and requesting participants as we progress with development of the
new code. 


Brandon King
Wilmington, NC



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