[thelist] Topica = Spam?

[Shawn K. Quinn]

On Sunday 2004 January 25 08:34, Toby Mills wrote:
  [I wrote:]
> > I personally filter all mail that is either exclusively HTML, or
> > multipart-alternative with an HTML part, to trash. That takes care 
> > of the vast majority of my spam, and makes it painfully obvious who
> > I need to educate about the benefits of sending mail in plain text.
> > 
> > Also, as a security precaution, I have my e-mail client set to not
> > parse HTML *at all*.
> 
> Why punish people for wanting to send an email with rich text
> features like colour, bold, underline and nicely inserted hyperlinks.

For one, they are unnecessary. My e-mail client makes a link out of 
properly formed URLs anyway. Another reason, is that there is no 
guarantee I'm using an e-mail client that can even be made to support 
HTML. HTML is for Web pages, not e-mail.
 
> I can understand that a lot of spam use html to imbed images to get
> around spam filters but that no reason to punish or "educate" people
> into using only plain text.

I get virtually zero legitimate e-mail in HTML or multipart/alternative 
with HTML. If you ask me, multipart/alternative is even worse, as it 
means I get about a message two to three times as big as it needs to 
be, plus all the MIME boundary junk that doesn't belong.

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn