At 1:51 PM -0800 12/23/99, SRE wrote:
> I also have a big problem with people mostly LookOut users,
> (or is that OutLook?) who insist they are not sending HTML
> format tags and thousands of nbsp's...
In slight defense of these clueless @#$@#ing lusers :), Outlook goes out of
its bloated way to sneak HTML in. In the first place it gives you what
looks like a format-enriched word processor editor, without telling you that
the results will be rendered in HTML or using the word HTML at all unless
you dig around... they just talk about "formatted" mail and give you a bunch
of pretty little templates that makes it look as though Outlook mail is
gorgeous and the competition's mail is dull.
In the second place, even when you sucessfully discover the difference
between HTML and plain text and absorb the principle that sending
conservatively is polite, and you change Outlook's options to create and
send plain text by default, there is a SEPARATE setting (easy to miss) that
controls what happens if you REPLY to an HTML-ized message. By default,
Outlook will reply to a message in the format it was sent, whatever your
other preferences may be.
What we need is a plain text control just above the SMTP/Sendmail level. By
control I mean three settings: [1] accept everything and deliver it as
received, [2] accept everything but deliver only the plain text portion, [3]
actively refuse (bounce with an error message) anything with a non text
component. Putting it into Sendmail itself would really give it some teeth.
