Hi,

 Thanks for all of the responses. I too am a pine user. I must admit that
the only people that I know who are using these text-only email readers
are programmers and sys-admins and old-time internet folks. It really
doesn't matter what we think, it's up to Joe public. I managed to convince
my client to avoid colour for now!

 It has taken me a while to get my head around the fact that there is life
after ASCII. There is such a thing as sending non-ASCII "communications".
It will happen. We cannot stop it. It can work fairly well also!

 See www.canadiantire.ca. These guys are a Canadian hardware store chain
and they distribute a custom advertising flyer by email. It works. When
you sign up for it, you choose which types of products you'd like to be
informed about, you select which email software package you are using, and
they send you email that is formatted appropriately for your email
software. They need to expand their list of choices for sure but they have
developed an interesting system for so far. Interestingly, "pine" is one
of their choices. If you choose Netscape's lates 4.0 email browser, they
send you a wild piece of MIME email that links back to their web site to
get pictures of the various products and you end up with a picture of an
advertising flyer that looks exactly like what you typically get swamped
with in paper format as junk mail.

 My final statement here opens up an interesting debate to which I think
most of you might have a hard time arguing against.

   I'd rather waste bandwidth than cut down more trees!

David Mayerlen
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(I have no affiliation with Canadian Tire!)