[comment] HTML Email -- STOP IT please!

[Don Hammond]

On 20 Aug, Michael Walter wrote:
| Sorry, but I am not responsible for your choice in email client or supported
| protocols, only my own.  I will not adjust my corporate email policies or
| software based on the limitations of your email client.  If the content of
| my email messages offends you in any way, simply block messages from my
| email address.  If you want the advice that I offer on the list, you will
| have to accept the formatting of it as well.  Just as you would in any paper
| document.  I will not participate any further in this, "holy war", that imho
| is just a waste of bandwidth and time, this has just been bugging me for a
| bit.
| 

That is so palpably arrogant, and ignorant, that I'm happy to oblige.
But first, and for the record, community only works when individual
participants respect the community over self.  Here's the logic:

1. html email is unnecessary
   a. there are legitimate reasons why people opt against it
2. sending html mail is at the *option* of the sender.
   a. there are no legitimate reasons why it *must* be sent to a public
      list of technical content
   b. if you think there are, then make a web page and post a url
3. receiving it is *not* at the option of the recipient.

Therefore, *only* senders have the ability to conform (or not) to
community standards. Demanding others change software is incredibly and
ignorantly uncalled for, and does not even remotely compare to turning
off an *option* that's unnecessary. This isn't a fringe element making
the request. It's a significant part of the community.  You can make an
individual sacrifice - and a completely insignificant one - on behalf
of many others, or you can demand *many* *others* make the sacrifice for
you the individual.

In some 6 years on the net I've put all of 3 people in my kill file. I
have no problem with different opinions. I can't stomach people who
don't give a crap about others. Welcome to my kill file, #4. Oh, BTW,
guessing that you reflect and/or set your "corporate email policies",
I've done you one better and plonked the whole f'n domain.

# grep gliatech\.com /etc/mail/access
gliatech.com    550 Access denied

$ cat ~/.procmail/killrc 
[...]
:0
* ^\/(From|Reply|Sender|Received).*\<walterm@Gliatech\.com\>
{
  LOG=">>>>>>>>> NWMT [$MATCH]$NL"
  LOGABSTRACT=no

  :0
  /dev/null
}

-- 
                   /"\
Don Hammond        \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
Raleigh, NC US      X        Against HTML Mail,
                   / \      and News Too