not even a newbie

[Alan Dayley]

(Craig is a good guy.  Gave me my first set of Red Hat disks.  He really believes in the Open philosophy of learning and doing things on your own if you can.  Most of the rest of us are a little softer on that point.)

HTML mail has a few things wrong with it, especially for mail lists.  Google something like "html email mail list don't" and I am sure you will find some complete explanation.  This one is pretty good with HOWTO links for turning HTML off: http://www.expita.com/nomime.html.  (It was 13th in the above google search results.)

IMO it is bad because:

1. It wastes bandwidth without really adding to content.  Mailing list email is about what you say not how pretty it looks.  The fonts, sizing, colors, etc. that HTML provides ususally does not add to the knowledge imparted by the words so it is just a waste of extra bytes.

2. For those with low security settings on their computer, HTML mail is a primary way to get trojans, viruses, spyware and other nasty stuff.  My Kmail client on my box at home is set to display HTML mail as raw text so any nasty stuff can't get executed.  I can then load it as HTML manually in a browser if I want to.  (Then I tell the sender to use plain text.)  ;^)

Alan

-------Original Message-------
From: Craig White <craigwhite@azapple.com>
Sent: 06/19/03 08:25 PM
To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Subject: RE: not even a newbie


> Done, no more html I didn't know it was a problem, would you care to
elaborate ?
> Thanks for the encouragement.
----
not unless you come up with a question. I'm not very keen on getting
into a long winded discourse and provide a dissertation for someone that
hasn't even bothered to try to learn any of these things by trying them
out.

Craig