David
  I run a list with 3200 subscribers in 46 countries.  They have all sorts
of mailers, from the most sophisticated to the most basic.  Many of them
are unable to receive anything that is not "text/plain" or, if they can
receive it, convert the attachment into gibberish.  For that reason we
do not allow the use of attachments to the basic plain text message.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Judith Hopkins, Listowner of Autocat
     [log in to unmask]
     http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~ulcjh

On Mon, 2 Feb 1998, David Mayerlen wrote:

> 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
>