html email

[Ethan Tira-Thompson]

>> For instance, take a look at what happened here:
> It also doesn't happen with non-broken mailers (in that case, I was  
> attempting to line wrap manually, which almost certainly has  
> something to do with it).
There must be a lot of broken mailers out there, because I see it  
happen a *lot*.  Very annoying when I search for some error message,  
find a discussion on an archive, and can't read the quotes to follow  
the discussion because everything is crazy-indented due to the word  
wrapping at some arbitrary width while people are replying.  It's  
especially bad when code is involved, with literal '>'s in the mix.

> ...which, if several people are using it, on several lists, adds  
> up. Now add, say, 100 people per day downloading it, and now it's  
> several mb a day, about 100 mb a month, and now you're talking some  
> more significant numbers.
100mb a month still isn't significant.  That's a *trickle*.  But  
fine, if everyone was doing it, it would double the mailing list  
bandwidth usage.  Maybe there are mailing lists that exceed my  
imagination where that would be a problem.

And if it is a problem, and here's my original argument, *just strip  
the html version*.  The two alternative versions are explicitly  
intended to be alternative versions, and only one is expected to be  
displayed.  So I claim it's unexpected to bounce the message.  It  
*is* expected to have one or the other shown.  Dropping the message  
altogether is at best unexpected, at worst rude and counter  
productive, and in general, annoying.

-ethan