Re: [Fsfe-uk] Administrivia: html duplicates

[Chris Croughton]

On Sat, Jan 26, 2008 at 12:22:45PM +0000, Sam Liddicott wrote:

> Are these html-only emails or emails with an alternative text part that 
> Mutt is having problems with?

As far as I've founmutt handles alternative fine, if one of the
alternatives is a text patr then it displays that and ignores the
alternatives (actually, you can still get at them with 'v' if you really
want).  It's HTML-only it has problems with, and especially when the
MIME headers are broken or missing as with a lot of the mail I get.

The problem is that it still bulks the mail by a factor of lots (minimum
worse than 2, maximum 5 or 10 in the case of stuff with loads of font
changes), which impacts:

  bandwidth of the mail server
  bandwidth of recipients
  mailbox size on servers
  mailbox size in user stored mailboxes
  time to load mailboxes

I accept that in some few cases HTML is useful.  Emphasis, tables
(please not pictures!), links.  And if everyone and every mailer looked
at the what they were sending and only sent in HTML when it were
actually necessary then I wouldn't be bothered about it.  But that's not
the case, almost? every mailer is either 'on' or 'off' as a global
setting so if HTML is allowed then everything comes through like that.

Chris C