RE: HTML-enabled mailing lists

["Woodrick, Ed" <ewoodrick @ ed-com . com>]

Title: RE: HTML-enabled mailing lists

Why do yall go through so much trouble to not utilize existing Internet messaging standards? The overhead of an HTML message is pretty small. I wouldn't be surprised if it was near the overhead of a UUENCODE!

It's just so disconcerting to me that some of the folks who are long time residents of the Internet, a mechanism that many call so radically state-of-the-art, that you would have such an archaic attitude. Don't you feel like a dinosaur in Disneyland? Going around growling and everyone else ignoring you?

HTML is here to stay. If you want to provide a service to you list users, then you probably should start thinking about how to work WITH your subscribers than against them.

Granted, not everyone has a mail reader that will read HTML, but at what percentage do you make HTML a standard? And for those of you who are stuck on UNIX using readers that only stand regular text messages, don't gripe and complain that the rest of us decided to move on and leave you in the 60's. Plain text messaging is on the way out. Corporate messaging systems have been rich text for many years.

Lead, Follow, or get out of the way!

Ed Woodrick
EDCOM

-----Original Message-----
From: Todd Day [mailto:today@di.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 1998 7:17 PM
To: 'List-Managers@GreatCircle.COM'
Subject: HTML-enabled mailing lists

taboo_body          <<  END
/^Content\-Type:\s+text\/html/i
END

At first, I wanted to take this approach as well.  Unfortunately, many
subscribers are stuck behind e-mail gateways at some small companies
where they can't change this kind of behavior (configured at the
server).  So I have written a series of scripts as a front end (I call
it the anal.filter) that tries as hard as it can to look for plain text
that is usually included in MIME-type messages.  Not only does this
solve the HTML problem, but it also at the same time takes care of the
infamous WINMAIL.DAT enclosure.  It then scrubs all the MIME stuff off
before passing it into majordomo 1.93 (I also do things like
"cartoonize" profanity, word wrap long messages, change =2A to '.',
etc...  I even have it take care of some particularly annoying common
spelling errors!).  It has certainly made my mailing lists a lot nicer
to look at, and allows everyone to participate without much pain.

-todd-