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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.