Subject: [Asrg] HTML-burdened unsolicited mail

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 18:31:58 -0500

> Vernon Schryver wrote:

>> The overwhelmingly vast majority of the use of HTML is
> at best a waste of bandwidth and CPU cycles. 

> This is, at best, a representation of a personal, subjective
opinion. 

Maybe so, but let me stand as one who FIRMLY agrees with it.  :-)

> The reality is that there is great demand for "rich text"
messaging and there always has been. 

Perhaps, but RARELY among those who:

   1)  appreciate the cost differential, and

   2)  understand what it means.

The great majority of HTML-burdened E-mail is sent by clueless AOL, Hotmail and 
Outlook users who don't even realize that that's what they're sending.

Even if the SENDER "likes" it, many recipients don't if for no other reason than 
that their inbox fills up and overflows 3-5x sooner than it would otherwise... 
and that can create MONUMENTAL problems for recipients, cancelled mailing list 
subscriptions, and so forth.  At a MINIMUM, the sender should clear such 
formatting with recipients FIRST, before just presuming that it's okay.

> There are many clear indicators that large numbers of people like to both send 
and receive HTML formatted messages. 

I don't think that's true at all, and in particular not for people who realize 
the implications of it.

>	As far back as 1981, when I first started selling one of the
first "corporate" email systems, Digital's ALL-IN-1 office, customers
were asking for and often demanding "rich text" or "high quality" email
messaging capabilities. 

If they want "high quality" e-mail there are a whole variety of options, going 
well beyond HTML.  One is to send .DOC files (which can be read with freeware 
viewers), another is Adobe PDF files.  In any case, such mail does not have to 
be sent from unknown/untrusted/unfamiliar senders.  It's NOT a good idea to send 
such stuff until you've verified that your recipients are prepared (and 
willing!) to receive such higher-cost, reduced-compatibility messages.

And if they REALLY WANT to use HTML, another approach without most of the bulk 
is to put it up on a Web server (using an 'unguessable' URL) and E-mail (as 
plain ASCII text) the URL to the intended recipient.

> If anything, the demand for such a capability has increased over time.

Mostly, the "demand" for such features have come from perversely creative 
spammers who use these features to deceive/mislead/obscure.

> It is no more reasonable to demand that the world accept that
email should not contain rendering information 

That's NOT AT ALL what we're proposing.  We're saying that such E-mail is NOT 
suitable for an INITIAL, unsolicited contact.  Once a relationship is 
established between a sender and a recipient, the recipient can enable HTML 
(etc) for that sender IF THEY WISH TO.  Meanwhile, unsolicited, UNWANTED, 
UNTRUSTED users of those technologies are quickly and easily sent packing (which 
is, after all, the goal).

> than it would be for some
religious sect to demand that we not "pollute" the walls of our homes
with art. Our challenge should be to figure out how to give the users
what they want without exposing them to unnecessary risks. 

What the USERS want is to block spam and malicious content 
(viruses/worms/trojans) coming from people they don't want to hear from.

Users wanting HTML or attachments from indicated senders could enable that 
easily.  Perhaps (implementation at specific ISPs permitting) they could even 
opt to open back up to (just that recipient) receive attachments/HTML/encoding 
from just anybody, but then they don't have much cause to complain about getting 
the spam that they're then putting out the welcome mat for.

I think that most users would be DELIGHTED with the tremendous reduction in spam 
count and volume that my solution would yield, and would find that the minor 
effort to re-enable trusted senders would be well worth the huge benefit.

[I don't deny that SOME users are going to be HUGELY annoyed by widespread 
adoption of my proposal... but that group is going to be mostly spammers, 
abusers, and virus authors, and I think we can agree that those are precisely 
the users for whom we don't mind making their life a lot more difficult. :-) ]

> If the problem is a difficult one to solve, it isn't because what the users
want is some that is not "legitimage," rather, it simply means that
we're not being creative enough in defining solutions.

I think the solution as I'm proposing would be cheap, easily implemented, HIGHLY 
effective, and with minimum-to-no impact on most users.  It would GREATLY reduce 
the costs to ISPs (and thus to users) of spam and wasteful HTML-burdened e-mail 
while still allowing them to get basically everything they want to receive.

>> There is far more use of HTML mail to violate privacy
> with such as "web bugs" than legitimate use.

> I don't believe this to be true. I get loads of "legitimate"
HTML mail every day. 

Some people probably do, but rarely do they need to receive it from 
unknown/untrusted people UNSOLICITED.

Gordon Peterson                  http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002  Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support the Anti-SPAM Amendment!  Join at http://www.cauce.org/
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.

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From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 00:21:09 -0400

>    2)  understand what it means.

Which pretty much means only the techie community, and a small 
proportion of that.  This is a pointless discussion.  The vast 
majority of end-user email is HTML.  They use bold and italics in all 
their other applications.  They embed cutesy images in all their 
other applications.  Why shouldn't they in email?  Cost differential? 
They really don't care.  And then of course there is commercial, 
requested email, which is virtually 100% HTML.  Let's discuss 
something more feasible--like replacing SMTP with a new system 
overnight.

>plain ASCII text) the URL to the intended recipient.

Sure.  I'll just tell my father that when he wants to emphasize 
something he shouldn't hit Apple-B, he should pay his ISP for a web 
host and learn how to publish on it.  Or were you instead proposing 
that everyone in the world upgrade their email client to something 
that uses "pull" instead of "push"?  Please can we be serious?

A lot of anti-spam people spend way too much time looking at spam, 
and not nearly enough time looking at real email.  The only real 
email they see is from other techies.  So they assume that when there 
is a difference between spam and their real email--the difference is 
something specific to spam.

In fact, for the average non-techie, spam looks an awful lot like 
their real email.  (That shouldn't be terribly surprising if you stop 
and think for a minute.)

Do you want numbers?

I have a collection of non-spam email sent by average, clueless users 
to their friends, and inadvertently cc'd to me via 
[email-masked].  Messages are over the past year.

Total Messages:				98,111
Total text/plain or no content-type:	26,235

Plain text is accounting for 26% of good email in that sample of the 
non-techie community.  Want to shudder?  34% was multipart/mixed and 
29% was multipart/alternative.

The anti-html-email war was lost years ago.  It's right up there with 
"html is for describing structure, not appearance".  I used to fight 
it too, but it's time to move on.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Anti-Spam Service for your POP Account
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.

---

From: "Peter J. Holzer" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 13:39:35 +0200

> I don't think that's true at all, and in particular not for people who realize 

When we replaced Netscape 4 with Mozilla as the default MUA, we disabled
the HTML editor at the explicit request of some users. So far only one
user has complained.

> viewers), another is Adobe PDF files. 

These options are way worse than HTML. HTML is simple to render, mostly
device-independent (I can view an HTML file just fine in an 80x25
terminal window, and I could also view it on a palm without much loss of
quality). Word documents are proprietary, and I don't know any program
which can display them reliably except MS Word (and then only the same
version which was used to write it). PDF files assume a fixed page
layout: My 21" monitor is capable of displaying a whole A4 page in a
readble font size. a 17" monitor usually isnt, and a palmtop doesn't
stand a chance. Also, Word and PDF generally are a lot larger (even
though HTML produced by editors is often extremely bloated).

Also, an HTML renderer as a separate program can be small and fast. I
use w3m for HTML to text conversion, and it is usually so fast I don't
even notice that I'm not reading a text mail. Invoking Star Office or
Acroread takes several seconds, and it opens in a separate window, which
is annoying (even more so if I am logged in remotely, and the X11
connection is going over an SSH tunnel over a 768 kbit/s leased line
(and that's fast - I used a 33.6 modem until not too long ago)).

I agree fully, that HTML is usually unnecessary and has little benefit
over plain text, but suggesting the use of Word or PDF instead of it is
replace one evil with an worse one.

> In any case, such mail does not have to 
> be sent from unknown/untrusted/unfamiliar senders.

ACK.

> plain ASCII text) the URL to the intended recipient.

For normal mail, I think that's a really stupid idea. (It goes a bit
into the direction of message/external-body or Bernstein's IM, but
without automatic retrieval by the MUA, that's a sure way to get your
e-Mail ignored). It is feasible if the document at the URL meaningful
outside of the context of the email (Like: "I wrote up the minutes of
the last meeting. You can find them at $url").

	hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | Latein ist das humanoide Äquivalent
|_|_) | Sysadmin WSR       | zu Fortran.
| |   | [email-masked]         |
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ |    -- Alexander Bartolich in at.linux

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From: James Seng <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 23:32:35 +0800

"behaviour" solutions to spam problem seldom works because spammer will 
quickly adapt and change their "behaviour".

For example,

We can filter keywords, and spammer will avoid using those keywords. We 
can do IP blacklist, and spammer will avoid using those blacklist. We 
can ban HTML and spammer will start using plain text. etc etc.

So, either you have an adaptive (and thus fuzzy) solution or we need to 
think out of box.

-James Seng

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From: James Seng <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 23:33:42 +0800

For example,

-James Seng