On Tue, 6 Jan 1998, David Mayerlen wrote:

>  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!

True, but I would rather someone send me a URL, to which I can cut, and
then run Netscape, paste, and view, than an HTML message that looks like a
ton of garbage.  Also, posting/mailing a URL is better because only those
who want to see it, go visit it (save those poor little electrons from
abuse), plus, you cut down on the bulk, and wasted time, bandwidth for
those that don't, or can't read it anyways.

HTML is e-mail is EVIL.  For an average 10 line post to a list, we are
talking about 2K of data in plain text.  With HTML (even a mear text
colour change) we are talking 10K.  This is a 500% increase.  Think of all
the (basically) wasted disk space on the worlds computers for the pretty
colours. Here is a good example:

Here's a quote from news.software.nntp:

   "Well, an analysis of the past month's worth of Path: headers indicates
   that I received 14,989 unique pathhosts on my transit server.  As you
   say, this probably isn't a useful statistic, but it certainly is
   eye-catching.  This means that a single 2K article which is widely
   propagated takes up around 30GB of disk space around the world, and
   costs the net about $3500 in disk space.  (``Hundreds, if not
   thousands, of dollars!'')"

If this is what happens to a 2K message, can you imagine if all posts were
10+K in size.  Tell that to anyone who says that HTML in mail doesn't cost
anyone anything.  The above doesn't include mailing lists that archive
mail etc.

Think of the impact before sending, or encouraging HTML in MAIL, not only
will some not be able to read it, but it COSTS bigtime.

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