Another factor is bandwidth, plain text has the smallest footprint. A 1K
message in plain text can be 3K or more in HTML. If you are sending out
hundreds of messages a week this additional overhead starts to build into
more serious numbers. If you stick to the plain text and thus keep the
message size down you are saving your subscribers both time and money. As
people in Europe have to pay for all the phone time involved in being on the
internet these figures soon start to add up.

Best regards, Adrian Miller (On behalf of Adaptec Software Products Group)
Please reply to me in this newsgroup or via the Adaptec CD-R list
Adaptec CD-R community - http://www.cdrcentral.com
Adaptec CD-R Info Grid -
http://www.adaptec.com/products/overview/cdrgrid.html


----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Howie" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 22, 1999 7:21 PM
Subject: Re: Has Microsoft destroyed mailing lists? / Rant Exchange?


> On Mon, 22 Nov 1999, Chris Anderson wrote:
>
> > In MY humble opinion, Plain/Text has had its day, and is long due to be
> > relegated to the history books.  You may quibble about the pro's and
con's
> > of HTML vs RTF vs whatever, but the point of email is communications.
And
>                                                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> Exactly, and this is precisely why plain text is the lowest common
> denominator. Just because plain text was the only medium of choice back in
> the 70s shouldn't relegate it to the history books. It worked then and
> still works now.
>
> Communication is all about getting *information* sent back and forth.
> Whether you embelish it to look cute with bolding, underlining etc., adds
> nothing to the information content, it just bloats the message to a size
> much larger than it should be, wastes bandwidth and detracts from
> interoperability.
>
> Keep the cute marked-up text for Web pages and local Micro$loth
> proprietary email systems.
>
> > there are better ways to communicate than via plain text.
>
> Like?
>
> Scotty
> --
> Steve Howie                                     [log in to unmask]
> Netnews and Listserv Admin                      519 824-4120 x2556
> University of Guelph
> "If it's not Scottish it's CRRRRAAAAAAAPPPPPP!"