send an email with picture/rich text format in the body

[Ten]

On Monday 29 May 2006 11:28, Max M wrote:
> Ben Finney wrote:
> > "anya" <anyab5 at gmail.com> writes:
> >>Acctualy there is a solution:
> >>see  http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/473810
> >
> > Again, sending anything but plain text as the message body ensures
> > that your message is unreadable to a large number of people using a
> > variety of software. It's your choice whether to restrict your
> > audience in this way, but know that that's what you're doing.
>
> 90% of users are non-technical users who use standard email readers,
> that can easily read html messages.
>

Even if your 90% were any kind of real statistic, 90% of everyone is not 
everyone, and there ends the technical debate.

100 != 90

As a matter of interest, I'm almost sure that on checking you'd find
that of the widely available mail clients, only a minority will display
such a mail properly without further interaction.

You might find that platform neutrality and usefulness to people are
genuine considerations for those with any kind of technical integrity,
and that "most people use this particular piece of proprietary software
so let's just say screw the rest" (whilst still benefiting from a
platform-neutral medium, and bouncing it off open source servers) is
widely considered a shabby and broken way of working.

If people want to palm people off with excuses and
generally implement things in a lazy, badly badly planned, mercenary and 
undisciplined way, they're probably better off spending their time with the 
non-technical management and not amongst programmers.

Sorry for the rant, good luck to the guy if he's solved his problem, 
but damn, that "90% so let's not bother doing things properly" stuff makes my 
blood boil.

-- 
There are 10 types of people in this world,
those who understand binary, and those who don't.