On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 04:10:46PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote: > I guess I think that, for better or worse, HTML has effectively replaced > ASCII as the common format that (almost) everyone can read. My guess is > that if we asked people to send email in HTML, we'd get a lot more > acceptance than if we asked people to send all email in plain text. Not > everybody can run Thunderbird or whatever; some IETF participants are > effectively required by their employers to use Outlook or worse. Point of information: In most cases, you doesn't need to change MUA's to send plain text e-mail. In particular, there are ways to send plain text email in GMail and Outlook. Instructions for many MUA's can be found here: https://useplaintext.email/ Now, some of these MUA's will corrupt whitespace even in plain text mode, so they aren't suitable for sending context diffs suitable for being imported using "git am" or the patch(1) utility. But that's not necessarily a problem if you are discussing an I-D. Even ASCII art will generally be fine in the face of MUA's messing with spaces versus TAB characters. Granted that "acceptance" is different from "it can be done". So there may still be people who will whine/complain if the mailin server bounces messages with text/html. But it's not *impossible* to send plaintext e-mail using "Outlook or worse". - Ted P.S. Historical tidbit: this was originally an anti-spam measure by kernel.org mailing list admins. It's actually quite effective --- and certainly it prevents Fancy Bear-style "John Podesta" style attacks. We may have had security and discussion quality benefits by outlawing HTML in kernel.org mailing lists; but that's not why it was originally instituted. And in practice, we haven't had that many complaints, and I refer you to the stats I posted showing a regular supply of first-time contributors despite the fact that kernel.org mailing lists bounces all e-mails with text/html.
