Re: newsletter formats for email

>   The spammers tend to do the first - which is quite crunchable. REAL

Actually, quite a few spammers send multipart/alternate, but with the
plain text alternative empty!

>   letters would provide one highly fancy HTML version, and one easily
>   accessible RFC 822 type letter (plain text) as an alternative.

There are bandwidth/mail folder space considerations (speaking as someone
who just had his office mailbox closed for exceeding its quota).

Structurally, I think that such newsletters are not really emails, but
attachments sent instead of sending a URL.  Unfortunately, if the attachment
is saved, it ends up in the local zone in the Microsoft security model
(whereas, with the latest security patches, email HTML ends up in the
internet or possibly untrusted zones), so saving HTML attachments on
Windows is not to be reccommended.

Another security issue is that some people are considering blocking CID:
URLs used to reference other attachments to the same email in order to
include the images in the mail (I'm not sure if CID: is a proper internet
or W3C standard).  This is because they are being used (not with images)
as parts of security attacks on Outlook [Express].

(Yet another thing is that HTML sent as the body of email is generally
broken as none of the common GUI email programs seem capable of creating
valid HTML.  It also tends to be highly presentational.)

Received on Friday, 19 April 2002 02:09:42 UTC