Somewhere on Shadow Earth, at Fri, May 15, 2009 at 11:38:40AM -0700, Aaron J. Grier wrote: > > Your email client cannot read this email. > > I most certainly can, but I prefer reading text/plain where available. > why do you waste my time like this? why do you even bother sending a > text/plain part? why not send straight HTML with text/html and don't > even bother with multipart/alternative. > > but I'm pissing in the wind here. > > at least I never have to suffer comic sans.
Reminds me of a hate I wrote a ways back, which does not appear to be on my hates-software blog page. So here it is: Dear evil mailer (I don't know what mailer, as you are too cowardly to add an X-Mailer header to the messages you create): RFC 2046 is your friend. Read it, and understand the difference between multipart/alternative and multipart/mixed. When you send a message like the following: Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="950116ef3de77926c63485a3ea364034" Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Your email program does not support HTML. To view an online version of this email, please click the link below. which is followed by an HTML version of of the actual mail, THAT is NOT ACTUALLY multipart/alternative. multipart/alternative is only for messages where each part is simply an alternative format for the same basic content! The type you want is multipart/mixed. If you could get this right, my mail client, which has been told to ignore HTML mail in multipart/alternative messages (since HTML mail is a whole 'nother hate), would correctly use lynx to display your HTML message correctly to me. Instead, I generally don't bother to read the mail you created, as I can't be bothered to either click the link, or view parts to get to the HTML part. Honestly, if you can't be bothered, why should I? Die, you evil software, DIE! -- Timothy Knox <mailto:t...@thelbane.com> The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. -- Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line
