On Tue, 6 Jan 1998 08:49:29 -0500 Philo said:
>I HATE html and rtf in email. I've written probably gigabytes of mail and
>usenet postings, all with the standard ASCII character set. While my tone
>may sometimes be misunderstood, I've never been *not* understood because I
>couldn't underline, color my text, or insert pictures. IMHO, it's giving
>those who don't have anything to say a chance to waste bandwidth to hide
>their lack of substance behind form.

I share  your rant.  E-mail is  a text  medium. Adding  colors and  lots HTML
only obscures the information being  conveyed, no matter how well-intentioned
the author is.  Color is also not universally supported  on every computer in
existence  and differenet  computers  with different  monitors render  colors
differently so  when one computer setup  might show bright yellow  text as it
was intended, another might display it in a pale yellow that's barely visible
to the reader.

Of course, there are also many people, me included, who use only text viewers
to read e-mail.  I use a plain  text mail interface because  its simple, more
reliable, and faster,  than any graphical e-mail interface I  have ever used,
and I have used most of them.


  Stan  Horwitz  Internet: [log in to unmask]  Bitnet:  STAN@TEMPLEVM
  Temple University  -- Senior  Consultant (My  views are  all mine!)
  Manager of the Help-Net and Suggest lists and Listserv Postmaster.