Re: FN-FORUM: RE: MIME email type

date posted 13th March 2006 11:24

> From: "D D Glendinning" [EMAIL REMOVED]
> Morning All,
>
> Right, this is puzzling and wanted your take(s) on this. I am setting
> up my email with a small banner at the bottom as a footer. So the
> email is HTML. Am doing this in Thunderbird, and works fine. I am

HTML email is a vile abomination that should not be encouraged in any way.

Why:

* The mail reader often does not have everything that it needs to display
the email, that means it needs access to the web to display the mail.
* It is slower -- web accesses take time
* It cannot always be done offline
* It is a security risk - who knows what is embedded in the html
* Spammers love it -- include some unique identifier in a url that your mail
reader fetches and bingo, they know that they have a live email account
* Different renderers display the mail differently
* It increases the size of email

What does it add ?

Errrm, the ability to have fancy fonts & colours in email ....

Sorry: I read email for it's content, not to see the pretty colours.

> taking it a step further, and rather than attaching the image, I am
> making the image point to a folder on my hosting, so this will
> hopefully cut down on the size of the email.
> What i am confused about is when I send the image and it is received,
> although it just has a mime extention attachment, it does not have the
> image attached. This is good. It does have the image as footer, as I
> wanted it, but the strange thing is that the size of the email is as
> though the image was attached..
> What does this mean?
>
> Am I right in assuming that whether you drop the image into the email,
> or link to it and store it elsewhere, when the email is sent (or
> recieved) the client fetches a copy of the image and attaches it
> anyway?
>
> Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. Is there any point in me
> storing the image on the hosting and linking to it then?

--
Alain Williams
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd.
Linux Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256 http://www.phcomp.co.uk/

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