Re: Mail, paragraph formatting
- From: Jolly Roger <jollyroger@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:05:56 -0600
In article
<ddc9ed48-f965-4cce-9a4b-bfff15153ac0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
hellman@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Feb 7, 2:11Â pm, dorayme <doraymeRidT...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
First thing to do is to ensure the Mail message you are pasting
into is set for plain text under the Format menu. This often
works to remove all indents as well as removing things like
centred headings when you paste.
Thanks to you and Jolly Roger for your suggestions. I do sometimes use
both (CMND-SHIFT-T for plaintext to remove all formatting; and pasting
from Word into a "formatless" WP before copying into Mail), but both
of those are not totally idea. The first loses formatting that I do
want, and the second entails an extra step. It seems weird that Mail
remembers paragraph formatting from a paste but doesn't allow the user
to change that formatting.
The simple solution of using plain text is best.
Plain text is the preferred method for emails by people who know the
internet. It is efficient, safe, virus-free, will be readable by any
mail client at the other end, doesn't impose your font, size, style
preferences on others, and has far smaller risk of being filtered out by
spam filters.
HTML messages are generally two to four times larger for the same
message than plain text equivalents. That means not only do they take
longer to transfer over the net, contributing to network congestion,
they also take up more disk space on your computer, on the recipient's
computer, and on every server they hit along the way!
With HTML messages, the people who receive the messages have little or
no control over the text font, size, and style. They must read the
message in whatever font, size, and style *you* set when you created the
message. Plain Text messages, on the other hand, display in whatever
font, size, and style the recipient wishes.
HTML email is dangerous because it may contain links to external sites
that will do malicious things. For instance, a spammer can include a
link to an image, but this link contains a tag as data. The server at
the other end will get that request when your *read your email* and
based on the tag, will be able to confirm that you've read the email and
not only flag your email address as active/good, but also use your IP
with geographical location servers to assign a location code so that
they can then sell your email address to other spammers along with your
general location. If everyone stopped sending HTML emails, everyone
would block it, and then spammers would be left with very few means to
escape spam filters because their messages would have to b simple and
without tricks.
HTML email is wasteful, dangerous, and rude, IMO. It's just plain evil.
--
Note: Please send all responses to the relevant news group. If you
must contact me through e-mail, let me know when you send email to
this address so that your email doesn't get eaten by my SPAM filter.
JR
.
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