Re: [anti-spam-wg] Imaged spam

[Walter Ian Kaye walter@localhost]

At 03:20p +0200 08/20/2006, Gert Doering didst inscribe upon an
electronic papyrus:

> On Sun, Aug 20, 2006 at 02:20:34PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> >  * Gert Doering:
> >
> >  > The only things that come in as HTML-*only* are SPAM, Advertising, and
> >  > Viruses.
> >
> >  AFAIK, various research has shown that users respond better to HTML
> >  email, so it's increasingly used for non-bulk mail. 
>
> Do you have a pointer to these research results?
>
> I might believe that for non-technical users, but most technical folks
> I know strongly prefer non-HTML mails - even to the point of unsubscribing
> from vendor mailing lists if the vendor insists on sending HTML-only.

Yup -- I am one of those such people. :-D

HTML mail should never have been created in the first place. HTML was
not designed for mail, and is thus poorly suited to it. I've had an
idea for something better, but being incapable of writing my own
email client I am at a loss to provide the "running code" (reference
implementation) that the IETF likes to see. (It involves
multipart/parallel, in case anyone was curious.)


At 09:09a +0200 08/21/2006, patrick@localhost didst inscribe upon an
electronic papyrus:

> This is why MIME is invented. The receiver sees the content in the
> form (s)he wishes.

Nope, for the reasons Gert stated. Besides, *very* *few* mail clients
let you choose. Mulberry did, but I think that's defunct now. Apple
Mail only supports it by setting a preference via the Unix command
line (it's not exposed in the GUI), and I have yet to find any Eudora
setting to tell it which format to prefer.

Not only that, some number of us who prefer plain text are preferring
to save bandwidth and disk space, and YOUR sending of multipart mail
-- Patrick -- is causing us distress by wasting OUR resources.

HTML (and multipart/alternative+HTML) mail is a low-profile DoS attack.

Anyway, we're far afield from spam discussion now.