[Gllug] GLLUG Shirts

[Jason Clifford]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Sarah Ewen wrote:

> Is using HTML to bring a little colour, shape and life into
> a simple email such an evil thing to do when the MIME type is set?

Would you be happy were people to start emailing you with content that you 
could not display in your mail software and is so large is slows down your 
access to email?

> If it brightens somebody's day to send emails with a background,
> or write in blue comic sans serif, can we just let them be, and 
> grant them a few K, instead of immediately, predictably whining?

It's not a few K - while it might be for a single email and you are free 
to exchange HTML content via email with others who find this acceptable 
the fact is that this is a mailing list with hundreds of subscribers. 
Every message is retransmitted to each member and that uses far more than 
a few K of bandwidth.

> What amuses me is that those who complain are always the ones
> who are more than technically literate enough to integrate a text
> based browser into their text based mail client, should they want
> to see what the email says. 

Perhaps we don't want to expose ourselves to the further abuses that HTML 
email content can cause. Perhaps we're also sufficiently technically aware 
to understand that wasting bandwidth and time is not a good idea.

> I'm not directly targetting anyone who replied today; I'm just a bit
> tired of seeing the expected 3-4 mails tartly slapping people's 
> wrists as soon as someone sends HTML mail to the list. Particularly
> if the mail is from a newbie - as others have said, what kind of 
> welcome is that to the Linux community?

Well we could adopt the alternative solution presented in the earlier 
thread and simple drop all messages with html mime type at the mailing 
list server. I don't think that's a good idea though and one of the 
benefits of joining a more technical community is the opportunity to learn 
how to correct some of the mistakes you may be making.

Being politely told that HTML emails are not a good thing on a mailing 
list seems the better solution to me.

Jason Clifford
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