[Mailman-Users] The "right" way to reply to a mailing list

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Peter Shute writes:

 > I've seen a plain text section that didn't match the html version
 > (if I'm remembering that incident correctly).

Indeed, occasionally you'll see the arrogant "your MUA doesn't deal
with MIME properly" notice in a text/plain MIME part, rather than in
the preamble.

 > > Nonetheless, IMHO HTMLized email the way of the future so 
 > > we'd better get used to dealing with it.
 > 
 > Yes, whether we like it or not. It's a pity though that such
 > complex HTML is used. Do we really need anything more than the
 > ability to bold and underline? I'd be happy with some of the basic
 > Structured Text formatting commands, which have the advantage that
 > they're still intelligible in plain text.

You'd be amazed what teenage girls will do in an HTML email using a
WYSIWYG editor.  The point of the brain damage is like proprietary
drivers in the Linux kernel: trying to provide features that the
competition doesn't, in a non-standard way so that they can't just fix
their editors.