While I don't take as hard a line on it as Mr. Stross, I pretty much agree with the sentiment; HTML email is wasteful, a nonstandard kludge mandated by the Microsoft/Netscape marketing departments and rarely if ever does it do anything text can't do. I also use Mutt as my mail client; reading my mail involves logging into a UNIX machine I have a shell account on and running mutt; this means I'm not tied to reading my mail where I keep my (hypothetical) copy of Outlook/Eudora/Apple Mail and don't have to depend on webmail systems (which are, at best, a compromise; they're good if you're backpacking through Outer Mongolia or something but not something you'd want to use from day to day).
The problem, however, is that a lot of non-spam email is HTML-only these days; especially with Hotmail (which is surprisingly popular with people who aren't UNIX geeks; and I'm not going to be so haughty as to only correspond with fellow techies and penguinheads) now sending HTML only by default. So after spending some time trying to ask non-technical users to switch to plain text because I'm one of the last few remaining mortals to not use a web browser to read their mail, I configured my mutt client to automatically convert HTML to plain text, by piping it through lynx -dump. Since lynx doesn't do images or Javascript, this avoids "web bugs" and various spammers' tricks.
I still don't read mail with JPEGs/Microsoft Word documents/&c. though. And when Microsoft Trusted DRM-Mail or whatever comes in, I won't read that.
Here at work we regularly get sent megabyte-sized html rubbish as press releases from record companies and the like.
It's fast on cable, but I wouldn't want that stuff in my home account.
And no, I don't read it. There's a bizarre size/content correlation: after a certain message size (yet to be experimentally determined - if anyone wants to fund me to do the research...), content starts declining exponentially.
I hate HTML email, most of the stuff I get with HTML is spam.
Benjamin
I remember Pegasus Mail. Back at university, the students who couldn't get UNIX accounts used it, running on MS-DOS PCs on a Novell LAN. Like most things in the Microsoftiverse, it seemed like a fairly poor alternative.
As for me, I used Pine when I was a newbie, then switched to elm, and once that stagnated, to mutt. I haven't looked back.
Many non-geeks I know (from gigs and such) use Hotmail, and as such typically only send HTML mail. That's the only reason I bothered setting up mutt/lynx.
As for spam, http://spamcop.net takes care of that.
Well, I'm still using Pmail, and it's good.
Does your email account support procmail recipes to sort incoming mail? Can you save mail to folders on your server, as opposed to the disk of the PC you use? Would there be much hassle if you wanted to access your mail from somewhere other than your PC/copy of pmail?
I'm quite fond of Pegasus Mail.
I used Mutt on *nix for a while, but I just couldn't send email. I wanted to connect to my host's POP3 server, but instead sendmail wanted to act as its own server. Or, er, something. I'm not as geeky as I appear, really.
Note to acb: I am not your bitch. Stop advocating at me.
Sorry, that was extremely narky.
What I meant to say was, I've been using Pmail for ages, and while my main conduit for mail runs through an ISP-specific POP3 server that can only be accessed through the ISP dialup, not through a shell account that I can use Mutt on - an arrangement which I will probably change soon. Mind you, I'll probably still use Pmail.
With the mail sorting stuff, Pmail does that very well. Plus it's nice to have local copies of mail when I'm offline, something which having it on a server would preclude. (Yes, I know there are ways of synchronising local and remote mailboxes, but that's something neither Pmail or mutt are good at.) Swings and roundabouts, ya know?
Just because I don't see a reason to change means I'm dependent on a particular setup.
Good stuff. Every one of the ten reasons is completely valid. Every person out there who simply refuses HTML mail, makes it that much easier to place the problem where it belongs: squarely in the lap of the person who needs to learn how to use email.
And of course until Microsoft stop making HTML the default in their mail software, none of it has a snowball's hope in hell of changing anything.
Perhaps we need a new Internet from which all forms of Windows and Hotmail are banned, as are other newbie-coddling institutions like AOL, Blogspot and LiveJournal? That way the several thousand inhabitants of Internet 2.0 can enjoy their Star Wars discussions in peace.
Indeed. You sit in front of a spanking new computer, and decide you want to learn how to use this new-fangled Internet thing. Your OS (Windows, of course) tells you "oh, Outlook Express [or whatever] is *the* tool."
You load Outlook Express. It tells you "treat me like a word processor. Here, you can use formatting. And pretty colours. And everything! And this is perfectly normal!"
I've had people email me to ask why I never take advantage of my email system's (at the time, it was a text-only webmail interface) formatting "features".
Sounds like a good argument for Pegasus Mail where you have to launch questionable html mail into a new window by hand (it won't auto-execute). The system is also small enough (ie not microsoftness run) to avoid being a major hacker target! :)