Mac Forum / Applications / Eudora / December 2004

That's right. The smtp protocol doesn't care *what* you send.

Partly on grounds of taste too... Yup.

Yes.

HTML email came about when someone decided to integrate a mail client
into a web browser.  People by and large didn't know that email and web
browsing were separate things, and so they came to expect that their
email experience should be just like their web browsing experience.

Email was never meant to be anything but text only, and I have html
stuff turned off in Eudora.  I tend to ignore html-only emails.  Sure, I
can "open in browser," but I don't--because if you can't get your point
across to me in plain text, no amount of formatting and pretty pictures
will change anything.

Actually, it's a technical question and a social one.

No, but I think maybe we have a terminology problem here... SMTP is
purely a transport protocol. It does not tightly define the data format
or content rules of email. See RFC2821 and RFC2822 for more details and
pointers to many of the other docs that have relevant information.

Note that HTML is an ASCII-based format. The things it might link to or
have marked up for inline inclusion can be binary files, but HTML itself
does not require special encoding of any sort. That's why HTML has a
MIME time of 'text/html' instead of 'application/html' or something
else. Including everything an HTML file references in email does require
encoding of things like graphics. Not a technical problem, since MIME is
a well-established standard set for handling things that are not plain
text.

SMTP specifically (as defined in RFC2821 and its ancestors) doesn't much
care, as long as the message content is limited to the 'mail-safe'
character set (actually a subset of ASCII)  and doesn't have the magic
terminating sequence (CRLF.CRLF) embedded. Many SMTP servers (probably
almost all at this point) don't really care about the character set, and
will either pass or forcibly encode 8-bit content.

Yes and no. It is true that many people do not like HTML in email.  I
think it is not fair to describe this only as a view of 'computer types'
as it seems to me that it is a view that is attributable more accurately
to people who have been using Internet email longer than there has been
widespread access to HTML-aware mailers. I also think there is a range
of views on how to deal with the problem or why it is a problem.

The strongest argument I ever hear is the courtesy one. Sending someone
mail they cannot read is rude. This extends to mail sent to discussion
mailing lists or articles posted to newsgroups rather starkly: the only
format that everyone can handle is plain text. Close behind that is the
practical one that no two HTML-capable mailers seem to be able to agree
with each other or with any W3C spec on what exactly HTML is. The
security concerns are pretty weak, as they are based in either one
vendor's horrible misdesigns or specific things that no HTML-capable
mailer should do and none (except the crap from Redmond) do by default.

What has not been mentioned in this threat is that HTML in e-mail is
difficult to render by an e-mailclient that is not designed to read
HTML. Those who have no objections to HTML in e-mail are usually the
ones who use an e-mailclient from the same brand as the browser. Certain
mailclients come in a pairs: Firefox-Thunderbird, Internet
Explorer-Outlook, Mail-Safari, Netscape Navigator-Messenger or whatever
it is called.

The mailclients that come alone either need the assistance of a browser
from another make, or they do a bad job in displaying the HTML (like
Eudora).

The risk of having a browser and mailclient work closely together is
that they integrate more and more over time. Which is dangerous I am
told. Personally I prefer to have different companies specialise in what
they do best, not two things in the same product.