ADMIN: "Why no HTML?"

Perry E. Metzger perry at piermont.com
Tue Aug 12 14:49:52 EDT 2008


A couple of people have asked me why I have a policy against
forwarding HTML email. Here is the rationale, roughly from most
to least important.

1) Many people still read their email in systems that handle only
   plain text effectively. They're a large enough group that I don't
   like disenfranchising them.*
2) HTML email, like most machine parsable data, often has "gotchas",
   and as this is a security oriented list, I really don't want to
   have to vet email for hacking attempts. Vetting real code is
   unpleasant enough -- I don't want to have to look for attempted
   buffer overflows and web bugs in email I'm forwarding.
3) HTML email is harder to search, to edit down, to cut and paste
   cleanly, etc.
4) HTML email is often just plain ugly to look at.

Perhaps someday I'll change my mind, but for the moment, please send
only in plain text.

In the same vein, keep in mind that although Microsoft Outlook won't
show you that your lines are run on and include proprietary Microsoft
characters for balanced quotes and such, for the sake of the rest of
us, hit carriage return every 60 or 70 characters and don't send in
proprietary character sets.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com

(* I'm one of the group that reads email in a non-GUI. Please don't
tell me to switch mail readers, because I've yet to find a GUI based
one that will let me process hundreds to thousands of incoming emails
a day efficiently, and without efficiency I'd stop getting any work
done. Pretty toys are great if you're reading 20 messages a day and
can't remember commands -- I need stuff that's fully programmable.)

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