Hi,

 Just wondering if anybody has had any obvious problems with sending a
multi-part message (ie one part "text/plain" and the other "text/html").
Are there mail browsers that will have problems with this? Are there
mail servers (such as AOL) that may refuse multi-part messages or something
crazy like that?

 We are currently sending our email as "text/html", only because we have
found that due to the length of the email, some major email browsers
such as CC-mail, Microsoft Internet Mail and Microsoft Outlook default to a
variable width font if we use "test/plain", and the columns in our table
of products/prices then do not line up properly. I think the Microsoft
browsers always default to variable width and CC-mail jumps to a
different editor after a certain size limit is reached (~20K bytes) and
this editor then uses variable width. We found that by sending the email
as "text/html" and surrounding it with a single set of "<PRE>" and
"</PRE>" tags, these email browsers were defaulting to a fixed width
font and our data lined up well visually!

 We were getting many complaints about the misaligned columns of data.
It seems there are just too many of these email browsers that default to
variable-width fonts. With a five-figures sized subscription list, there
is no easy way to explain to all of them to switch to fixed width font.
We seem to be annoying less people using "text/html" than we were
annoying using "text/plain". Still, we'd like to please as many as
possible.

 Somebody suggested we send both "text/html" AND "text/plain" in a
multi-part message so that the email browser could pick which one to
use. This of course doubles the amount of data we send.

Trying to please everybody...or at least annoy as few as possible!

   David Mayerlen
   905-316-4568