On Mon, December 16, 2013 09:20, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: > Tomas Hajny wrote: >> . >> . >> Sorry, but I believe that you should indeed check the respective RFCs >> first (and possibly also search some information about what mail servers >> may do when receiving an e-mail with message encoding not supported by >> their configuration in order to understand what may cause differences >> with >> different recipients). > > In any event, this isn't really an issue about MIME types etc. The real > issue is that if somebody wants to get an announcement (or an urgent > request for help, or an urgent reply, or in fact /anything/) read by the > maximum number of people, then it's good practice to use plain text and > to leave off any attachments etc. that could possibly be misinterpreted > or cause the entire message to be misrouted as spam. > > The upside of the Internet is that there's a vast number of supported > data formats and protocols. The downside is that there's a vast number > of RFCs and informal conventions describing them. On occasion, for > everybody's sake, it's best to keep things as simple as possible.
While I agree to your statement personally (regardless of my own experience from a corporate environment ;-) - see below), the issue discussed here may be triggered with plain text messages without any attachments very easily (especially for posters coming from areas where us-ascii is simply not enough) - one accented character (e.g. German "umlaut" / diaeresis) in name or organization (e.g. included in e-mail signature) may be sufficient (if "supported" by the e-mail client configuration as described in my previous post). Now the promised bit regarding the corporate environment - some time ago, I was requested by a colleague not to use plain text mails by default because they were difficult to read (potentially causing recipients not to read them fully). It turned out that his view was primarily influenced by the default configuration of MS Outlook using font Courier for displaying plain text messages and that font being less readable than some others due to its non-proportional nature. Not even mentioning that not using top-posting also results in some people not reading responses because they do not realize the need to scroll to the bottom (obviously, this is also supported by the treatment of such messages in MS Outlook). :-( OK, let's get back to the slightly more educated Internet environment. ;-) Tomas _______________________________________________ fpc-other maillist - fpc-other@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-other
