[thelist] HTML in email

[Ron_Senykoff/BEA at beaerospace.com]

<snip author="Patrick Berry">
The "right" way to do HTML email is to send the email as a multipart
mime message, with one part being text/html and the other part being a
plain text version of the message.  This way, if the mailer
understands the text/html mime type, it will display the html message
and if it doesn't it should display the text.
</snip>
<snip author="Bart Posselt">
Sorry if I'm jumping on this late in the game. Watch out for Lotus Notes.

Turns out there's a recent version of Lotus Notes that has a bug in it that
not only prevents people from reading the HTML e-mail, but simply
highlighting the message completely hoses their computer and they have to
reboot. The administrator has to go in and remove the messages manually.
</snip>

We use Lotus Notes here... I have successfully received HTML emails
(although they looked pretty funky!), so I'm hoping that our version (5.5)
is not the buggy one!
But I think this brings up Patrick's point even more.  By properly encoding
the email with multiple MIME types, users like me (on Notes) will just see
the text, and the HTML actually gets attached as a file.  Users who mail to
me from Outlook with default settings will be sending me email like this,
which becomes a bit annoying (the attachments).

-Ron