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Posted by Ben C on 07/16/07 07:23
On 2007-07-15, andrew <andrew@ilium.invalid> wrote:
> On 2007-07-15, David Segall <david@address.invalid> wrote:
>> I was recently challenged by a friend because I send plain text emails
>> and I replied with a reference to the usual arguments
>><http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml>. At about
>> the same time I received an email from another friend that was written
>> using HTML on his company "letterhead". It looked great.
>>
>> Do you use HTML for your corporate or personal email? I'm talking
>> about ordinary email, not newsletters or flyers. Can you point me to a
>> site with some elegant HTML email samples? Can an HTML email be
>> written so that it looks OK in a client that does not accept them?
>> Apart from the "usual arguments" are there other pitfalls?
>
> There is a significant number of people who resent html in email. I
> count myself as one of them and count myself as fortunate that my
> email client (mutt) has the ability to strip away the text/html and
> present it as text/plain.
Are you sure that's what mutt does? I think often an html email comes
with a plain text component as well. Mutt shows that by default. Then
you can go "view attachments" and look at the HTML (or "HTML") version
with the program specified in ~/.mailcap or /etc/mailcap. On my system
that's "w3m -dump %s". W3m is a text browser a bit like Lynx. But you
can change that to open the HTML email in Konqueror or Firefox if you
like by adding a line to ~/.mailcap.
For example I have one for Word documents:
application/msword;antiword %s | less
that lets me view Word doc attachments in the console.
I think some emails may come without the plain text part, and you have
to view the attachments to see the message at all.
But it's w3m that's rendering the HTML in a plain text-only style. Mutt
is designed strictly according to purist UNIX/Eric Raymond principles
that computer programs should be small and do one thing well. It even
uses another program (called abook) for the address book instead of
building it in.
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