Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1982 mails)

[Anton Aylward <anton.aylward@xxxxxxxxxx>]

peter nikolic said the following on 11/17/2008 06:53 AM:
> On Saturday 15 November 2008, Diego Tognola wrote:
> > On Sat, 15 Nov 2008 12:23:24 pm Randall R Schulz wrote:
> > > Anyway, you're just not going to get both things: KMail _and_ decent
> > > HTML composition.
> > ...sad but true, but there's a lot of users out there still hoping - that's
> > why I was asking initially.
>
> Here's one hoping that HTML based emails get done away with completely 
> no winder people try to hide so many bugs in mail with this horrid HTML junk 
> mail

Lets not forget the problems associated with HTML-mail quite apart from
the complexity of rendering.

HTML mail is very often used by spammers for a variety of reasons.
This includes:
   - In-line images, which massively bloat the size of the message
   - No text, so forcing you to download the image that has the
     text and so getting details on your address, and hence validating
     it.
   - Spoofing addresses like this
      < a href="copyof.yourbank.com.at.spamsite.com/login">Your Bank</a>


> From a more practical point of view, many HTML mail composers,
especially on Windows machines, produce poor quality and massively
inefficient HTML.  You might look back over your archives (saved mail,
inbox) at some HTML mail and see what the HTML section look like.  Its
not odd to see masses of 'invisible' tables and for each line to be its
own <p> or <div> or table with the font, height etc specified over and
over again.

Late model Outlook produces reasonable HTML compared to some, but using
things like Word as a composer produces a lot of junk.

All this translates to bloat.  Its all very well to say that disk space
is cheap, but that bloat adds to the overhead and response time and can
make searches difficult.  Think what it takes to recognise strings hat
are also specified as base64, or '<font size="+1">A</font>nton', or
"%61%6E%74%6F%6E%2E%61%79%6C%77%61%72%64%40%72%6F%67%65%72%73%2E%63%6F%6D"
or many other things that can quite reasonably be rendered by HTML but
make life difficult for search engines and greping.  That impacts
performance and flexibility.

Put this in your e-mail:

 /"\
 \ /    ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN
  X     AGAINST HTML EMAIL
 / \    AND POSTINGS



-- 
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks
without knowledge, of things without parallel.
    --Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
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