Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Humans are political creatures but generally not political cartoons." --Holden Shearer, 2017-12-03

Ugh. you really don't need to send 43,076 bytes of CSS and table directives to communicate a brief ad 1,665 characters long with a 576 character stock footer. (Call that about half a page, in all.) Note that this does not include the verbose email message heder, just the message body. Skimming all of that code to try to spot the 3% that was te actual meant-for-human-eyes part ... well, it failed, so I resorted to banging on it with a text editor to find the actual message buried in that thousand lines of uselessness (and only then discovering that it was neither the expected subscription information nor interesting news, just an ad for something I don't care about).

I'm not saying this is unusual. That it's not unusual just makes it more absurd.

Best answer: just $%#*ing skip HTML email and send the text that says what you want to say. Acceptable answer: send messages as MIME type "multipart/alternative" and include a plaintext version (which my mail reader will show me by default) so I can at least find the content of the message in a glance. But really, 45 kB to send a paragraph? <eyeroll> But there's no chance the organizations that send these sorts of messages will reform their habits, so I'll just tell my spam filter to junk 'em, on the basis that even when they do say something interesting I'll never find the interesting text among the 97% cruft, so throwing the messages away unread won't be a significant loss.

HTML email has its uses. I have written messages that wanted the kind of structure that HTML was the most reasonable way to apply. (Once something mathy, another time something with insertions, deletions, and annotations distinguished from original text I was marking up.) But a paragraph -- or two or three -- of ordinary, straightforward text, is not a feat that requires HTML to accomplish.