Re: Email Format Poll for the list

[David Godfrey <..hidden..>]

Ok So I am a day late,
I said I would get this sent on Friday, and plumb forgot!

The results on the poll were surprising considering the amount of HTML mail seen
on the list.
They were also disappointing, out of the entire subscriber base, there we only
16 responses.

2  Don't Care
2  Multi Part is fine
12 Prefer Text only

In some cases multipart or HTML won't be read or have increased likelyhood of
being scored as spam.

I will respond to Strollers excellent comments in a separate email.
Thank you to all who responded, many of you raised valid and interesting points.

Personally I am happy to send in Plain Text, although I consider the lack of
"flowed text" in most clients (including thunderbird) to be a major issue.

Since before I started this thread, my client has been set to send "plain text
only", I sent the original email in HTML to attract attention. It certainly
seems to have worked! :)

With regard to Multipart email, in general I don't like it, partly because of a
"feature" of thunderbird, and partly because the plain text version of a message
written in HTML will often be incorrectly formatted.
Thunderbird, and some other clients treat multipart sections as attachments
(including vcards that outlook often sends) and on recent releases consumes a
large chunk of screen displaying ICONS for each attached file (or mime part)
In the old days it was not so bad, the attachments were listed as text, and
often in a pane that was collapsed by default, sadly this is no longer the case.
I suppose I really should come up with a suggested solution and raise a bug :(

Once again thank you to all who participated, and may the list stay HTML free.

Regards
David Godfrey

David Godfrey wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> The reason for this poll is below (for those that are interested)
>
> I would like to know how many people
>     a) are happy to receive html
>     b) prefer plain text
>     c) require plain text
>
> At the end of the week (Friday GMT+8) I will post the results
>
> Regards
> David Godfrey
>
> =======
>
> Just recently I have had two people on the lists query me,
> Asking if I intended to send email in HTML
>
> Well actually, yes, I guess I did.
> Partly because most people have HTML capable browsers,
> and long before I sent an email on the list I had noticed that many
> contributors also sent in HTML.
> This made me think it was not a problem.
>
> I understand why mutt users may not like HTML, in it's standard form
> mutt displays the html source.
> There are probably other clients that this is also a problem for.
>
> One problem with plain text and modern clients, is that text is wrapped
> at the senders end.
> Normally to something like 72characters.
> This is a huge waste of screen space where you may easily have 160 to
> 300 or more characters available on a modern screen.
> Worse is when the sender has changed the default to something large,
> then you often have to scroll left and right as well as up and down to
> see the whole message.
> HTML on the other hand allows for dynamic rewrapping of the text by the
> receiving client.
> The sentence before last was all one line.
> Change the width of this window, it should rewrap the text dynamically.
>
> HTML also allows simple formatting changes (_/*like this*/_) that can
> often assist with readability.
>
> Either way the poll will tell us what everyone prefers.
>
> Regards
> David Godfrey
>
>
>
>
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