Re: [Fsfe-uk] Administrivia: html duplicates

[Chris Croughton]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 01:29:31PM +0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> 
> Hi Chris,
> 
> > What 'better' client?  Oh, mutt isn't perfect but it works over ssh in
> > text only mode just fine.  I tried pine and Do Not Want.  Way back elm
> > wasn't bad but it was a pig to build (no autoconfigure and on several
> > systems I never got it to build at all).
> 
> Whilst you're listing text-based mail clients, there's nmh, but it
> doesn't like HTML either.
> 
>     http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/
>     http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/overall/whymh.html
> 
> There's not a lot of development work being done on it these days
> though.

Ye gods, I'd managed to forget mh.  Self-defence I think.  Even the old
mali(1) client was less bad.  It was probably fine when people only got
a couple of messages a day and didn't need to thread conversations, but
even it havving a command line interface doesn't get my vote.

> > Well, how about a social argument -- it gets people annoyed and they
> > don't bother reading the messages?
> 
> In the pre-web, pre-HTML days, it was a major issue getting newcomers to
> write readable text emails where the lines weren't too long, blank lines
> seperated paragraphs, and sigs were kept under four lines.  I hate to
> think what HTML has let them do these days.  I rarely get any unless
> it's spam -- you can choose your friends  ;-)  But have had the odd
> reply where someone's written at the top "My comments are in red", just
> above the "My comments are in green" from the previous reply, etc.

I see that a lot at work, they use Outlook.

Another thing that happens is lots of use of font changes, indentation
with strange side bars, stuff which does odd things when quoted and
therefore the default top-quoting is used because it's easier, and
masses of extraneous stuff like pictures (animated graphics in sigs!!!)
which bloats messages to 10x or more the size.

Chris C