Re: What's needed for mutt 1.6? (multipart/alternative)
On Mar 1, 2007, at 4:20 AM, Lars Hecking wrote:
Can you show me one single case where using multipart/alternative is
justified and actually makes any sense? It's bad enough to receive
bloated text+html email from clueless Outlook users, I don't want to
see such mail from mutt users, too.
The many inadequacies of using something other than plain text for e-
mail (bloated e-mail, security
vulnerabilites, etc) have been extensively discussed on this and
other newsgroups. I don't dispute
them and I realize my proposal for multipart/alternative e-mail
capabilities in mutt, will be unpopular with some.
However inspite of all our attempts to evangelize the world on the
merits of plain text e-mail, the
fact is that HTML e-mail is ubiqutuous (Outlook, Thunderbird, Lotus
Notes, Gnome Evolution, Mac OSX
Mail, etc). Very often the reality is that technically superior
solutions lose out to inferior ones
(i.e. Microsoft software) because of other factors (business models,
politics, fads, etc). In fact I have
many colleagues and customers who insist on not using plain text e-
mail at all. They are not swayed
by any of the numerous arguments for plain text. Many though have
been willing to compromise by using
multipart/alternative e-mail instead of pure html e-mail.
Since I have to interact with them and prefer a text-based e-mail
client, I've extended mutt with
configurable variables to provide better multipart/alternative e-mail
handling. I should point out
that none of these multipart/alternative changes are on by default.
So for those not interested in using
multipart/alternative e-mail, they are not affected.