On Thu, 1 Jul 2010, Justin Krejci wrote:

> I also don't see what is so bad about HTML mail in principal.

I like the principal, but the practice has sometimes been terrible.  It 
could be a simple way of marking up text, but in the hands of Microsoft, a 
small simple message with no markup (like this one) can be expanded into 
something hundreds of lines long.  I'm not kidding.  I'm not sure why they 
do it.  A guy just sent me something the other day that was 3 KB as plain 
text but the HTML attachment -- merely repeating exactly the same 
information -- was literally more than 1,000 lines long.

My theory is that Microsoft wants to create messages that don't look right 
in non-Microsoft MUAs.  They try to complicate their HTML to achieve this 
goal, thereby making absurdly large messages.  If successful, people will 
think "my email only looks right if I read it in a Microsoft email 
client," so they'll use one and they will send the ugly messages that no 
one can read without Microsoftware.  Microsoft will get a stranglehold on 
the market.

People don't know how to tell what program was used to send them an ugly 
message, they just know that it doesn't look right.

Mike