What OS & mail client do -you- use?

Mon Oct 27 10:45:46 PST 2003

On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 08:49:15AM -0800, richard childers / kg6hac wrote:
> What OS & mail client do -you- use?
> 

To put what, I hope, will be the final nail in this rotting coffin, I
conducted a little experiment.  I sent myself two emails, both with the
subject "test", and the body, "this is a test.".  The first was sent as
plain ASCII text.  The second, as text+HTML.

The results:

[10:37:59] >wc test-html.txt
      69     181    2111 test-html.txt

[10:38:04] >wc test-plain.txt
      36     137    1304 test-plain.txt

Nearly double the body size, and nearly double the message size in 
characters (and thus, in bytes).  To say EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

The only differences between the two messages:

1)  The HTML message would probably trip a lot of people's spamfilters.
2)  The HTML message would not be read by many people on general
principles.
3)  The HTML message may be withheld for further (manual|automatic)
processing on various mailing lists.
4)  The HTML message had centered the body, and changed the font style.

...and that's just for a small, 4-word message.  Imagine the impact (I
don't have the time or inclination, but I'd wager that this scales
linearly) when larger messages are sent, particularly when the HTML is
auto-generated (ever take a gander at the abortive attempts various MS
products make at autogen'd HTML?  It's horribly inefficient.)

So, on the basis of raw data transmitted and stored (both en-route and
at final destination(s)), the argument can be made that HTML is
unnecessary, wasteful and, in certain cases, abusive.

-- 
Mark C. Langston                                    Sr. Unix SysAdmin
mark at bitshift.org                                       mark at seti.org
Systems & Network Admin                                SETI Institute
http://bitshift.org                               http://www.seti.org