hotmail loses BASE tag

[Bruce Lewis]

Those who send HTML email and rely on the BASE tag may be interested to
know that hotmail seems to lose it. A multipart/alternative message I
sent to a friend who has hotmail did not work because the HREFs in the
HTML part were relative to the BASE that hotmail did not acknowledge.

[Roy Schestowitz]

__/ [ Bruce Lewis ] on Monday 27 March 2006 08:47 \__

Those who send HTML email and rely on the BASE tag may be interested to
know that hotmail seems to lose it. A multipart/alternative message I
sent to a friend who has hotmail did not work because the HREFs in the
HTML part were relative to the BASE that hotmail did not acknowledge.

Hotmail (MSN/Microsoft) and (X)HTML are a classic oxymoron. The same goes for
CSS, let alone ActiveX controls. With bgsound, font sizes that are
quantified in Pt and so forth, quite frankly, I could not care less about
how Hotmail handles HTML. It probably gets worse when it generates HTML and
sends it to others. When my Supervisor sends me a one-line E-mail in Outlook
(without special formatting), the message size is 38KB.

Best wishes,

Roy

[David E. Ross]

Bruce Lewis wrote:

Those who send HTML email and rely on the BASE tag may be interested to
know that hotmail seems to lose it. A multipart/alternative message I
sent to a friend who has hotmail did not work because the HREFs in the
HTML part were relative to the BASE that hotmail did not acknowledge.

What information were you able to convey in an HTML formatted message
that could not be conveyed in an ASCII formatted message?

See "Why HTML formatted e-mail is best avoided" at the end of
<http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d97jorn/pgp/killhtml.html>. Beyond
Rönnow's comments, recognize that an HTML formatted message is 3-4 times
as large as the same content in an ASCII formatted message. For those
of us using dial-up modems (still almost half of those who access the
Internet from home) this means a delay in downloading the message. For
all of us, this means more disc wasted.

--

David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

Concerned about someone (e.g., Pres. Bush) snooping
into your E-mail? Use PGP.
See my <http://www.rossde.com/PGP/>

[Bruce Lewis]

"David E. Ross" <no****@nowhere.not> writes:

What information were you able to convey in an HTML formatted message
that could not be conveyed in an ASCII formatted message?

None. However, the thumbnail photos of my new baby look better rendered
as pixel images than they would as ASCII art.

[David E. Ross]

Bruce Lewis wrote:

"David E. Ross" <no****@nowhere.not> writes:

What information were you able to convey in an HTML formatted message
that could not be conveyed in an ASCII formatted message?

None. However, the thumbnail photos of my new baby look better rendered
as pixel images than they would as ASCII art.

Put the pictures on a Web site. Put the link to the pictures in your
ASCII E-mail. It might just be my imagination, but I think Web pages
download more quickly than E-mail, especially through my dial-up
connection.

--

David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

Concerned about someone (e.g., Pres. Bush) snooping
into your E-mail? Use PGP.
See my <http://www.rossde.com/PGP/>

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Bruce Lewis wrote:

"David E. Ross" <no****@nowhere.not> writes:

What information were you able to convey in an HTML formatted message
that could not be conveyed in an ASCII formatted message?

None. However, the thumbnail photos of my new baby look better
rendered as pixel images than they would as ASCII art.

Send a text (ASCII, if you wish) message, and attach the photos. This is
not the same as formatting an HTML body.

But you knew that. <g>

--
-bts
-Warning: I brake for lawn deer

[Bruce Lewis]

"David E. Ross" <no****@nowhere.not> writes:

Put the pictures on a Web site. Put the link to the pictures in your
ASCII E-mail. It might just be my imagination, but I think Web pages
download more quickly than E-mail, especially through my dial-up
connection.

The pictures are on a web site, and the text/plain alternative part does
include links to them. I am conscious of dial-up issues because that's
what my parents have. The text/html part references thumbnails only and
includes height/width tags. Seeing thumbnails right in the message is
more convenient for the recipients, since they can quickly scan through
to see if any look interesting enough to view full size.

For this particular use, multipart/alternative email is better than
sending only plain text.

[Bruce Lewis]

"Beauregard T. Shagnasty" <a.*********@example.invalid> writes:

Send a text (ASCII, if you wish) message, and attach the photos. This is
not the same as formatting an HTML body.

But you knew that. <g>

Think that through. Say you have ten photos. Even sending 640x480
JPEGs would mean about 500KB of attachments. What if everyone shared
photos that way?

On the other hand, if you attach thumbnails, there's no convenient way
to let recipients go to the full-size photos if interested.

With HTML that links to a web site, you can let thumbnails be displayed
right in the message, and hyperlink to the full-size images, without
flooding the mailbox.

[David E. Ross]

Bruce Lewis wrote:

"Beauregard T. Shagnasty" <a.*********@example.invalid> writes:

Send a text (ASCII, if you wish) message, and attach the photos. This is
not the same as formatting an HTML body.

But you knew that. <g>

Think that through. Say you have ten photos. Even sending 640x480
JPEGs would mean about 500KB of attachments. What if everyone shared
photos that way?

On the other hand, if you attach thumbnails, there's no convenient way
to let recipients go to the full-size photos if interested.

With HTML that links to a web site, you can let thumbnails be displayed
right in the message, and hyperlink to the full-size images, without
flooding the mailbox.

Or you could put the thumbnails together on a single Web page, each
being a link to the corresponding full sized photo. Then you send only
the link to that Web page in your message. See, for example, my
<http://www.rossde.com/Canada_trip/Seattle_Vancouver.html>, which has 13
thumbnails, each of which is a link to a page of photos.

--

David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

Concerned about someone (e.g., Pres. Bush) snooping
into your E-mail? Use PGP.
See my <http://www.rossde.com/PGP/>

[Chris Sharman]

David E. Ross wrote:

ASCII E-mail. It might just be my imagination, but I think Web pages
download more quickly than E-mail, especially through my dial-up
connection.

Nope, not your imagination.
base64 encoding (the standard for binary emails, and sometimes text),
encodes 3 bytes into 4 - a 33% overhead.

Chris

[Bruce Lewis]

"David E. Ross" <no****@nowhere.not> writes:

Bruce Lewis wrote:

With HTML that links to a web site, you can let thumbnails be
displayed
right in the message, and hyperlink to the full-size images, without
flooding the mailbox.

Or you could put the thumbnails together on a single Web page, each
being a link to the corresponding full sized photo. Then you send
only the link to that Web page in your message. See, for example, my
<http://www.rossde.com/Canada_trip/Seattle_Vancouver.html>, which has
13 thumbnails, each of which is a link to a page of photos.

I've tried that, and it's vastly inferior. Suppose I got an email from
you with only that URL in it. As I'm going through email, do I stop to
follow the link or not? At a leisurely time I would follow it without
thinking twice. At other times it might depend on how interesting I
think your Seattle/Vancouver trip was. I would have to speculate
because the link gives almost no information.

If you used multipart/alternative email, your text/plain part could
include the text from your page plus a line that says

Illustrated at: http://www.rossde.com/Canada_trip/Se...Vancouver.html

If the text seems interesting I could follow the link and see photos.

Even better, if I'm using a mail client that knows HTML I would see the
text and thumbnails as soon as I open the email. Hmm...Capilano bridge
looks interesting. Let me see the bigger picture.

It's only a few seconds difference between following the link and having
the HTML right there, but seeing the thumbnails right away eases the
process of deciding whether to read the news and see the pictures now or
later.

Because of all the bad uses of HTML in email out there, I think you've
shut out of your mind the idea that there might actually be an
appropriate use for it. I'm convinced this is an appropriate use,
giving a significant advantage over plain text while maintaining a
reasonable message size.

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2006, Bruce Lewis wrote:

If you used multipart/alternative email, your text/plain part could
include the text from your page plus a line that says

Illustrated at: http://www.rossde.com/Canada_trip/Se...Vancouver.html
If you used simple text/plain mail, then the same thing would happen,
and I - for one - wouldn't have the bother of additionally receiving
and ignoring "alternative" text/html, which I routinely decline to
open from email.

<digression>
I love those spams whose text/plain "alternative" says something like
"if you can read this, then your mail client is not MIME capable".
Because I know that I can then discard the spam without needing to
know what it's advertising in its text/html part.
</>
If the text seems interesting I could follow the link and see
photos.
Surely any decent mail client can do that from a text/plain body?
Because of all the bad uses of HTML in email out there, I think
you've shut out of your mind the idea that there might actually be
an appropriate use for it.
Me? No, it's because I'm unwilling to devote the time to discerning
which (few) cases are bona fide versus those (many) which are abusive.

(The words in parenthesis are based on my own experience of inbound
mails, despite the rather strong anti-spam filtering which our mailer
implements. With "of the order of"[1] 10 spam offerings per bona fide
mail, it's not surprising that some spam gets through, in the
interests of minimizing the number of false-positive rejections)
I'm convinced this is an appropriate use, giving a significant
advantage over plain text while maintaining a reasonable message
size.

Faking the sender address as someone known to, and trusted by, the
recipient is a routine spam/abuse trick, so you're expecting the
recipient to take time out to discern that the mail genuinely does
come from a sender who is normally trustworthy.

Personally, I wouldn't want to put my recipients in that position, nor
for them to put me in it. But YMMV.

regards

[1] We don't actually know how many abusive offerings there are in
total, since the first level of filtering refuses any SMTP transaction
with the offending sites, meaning that we have no idea how many mails
would have been attempted if they had been given the chance. But last
year we evaluated the number of actual item rejections we were
recording, and it was 7:1 and rising.

[Bruce Lewis]

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@physics.gla.ac.uk> writes:

On Fri, 30 Mar 2006, Bruce Lewis wrote:

If you used multipart/alternative email, your text/plain part could
include the text from your page plus a line that says

Illustrated at: http://www.rossde.com/Canada_trip/Se...Vancouver.html
If you used simple text/plain mail, then the same thing would happen,
and I - for one - wouldn't have the bother of additionally receiving
and ignoring "alternative" text/html, which I routinely decline to
open from email.

How does Pine work to make it such a bother? Using emacs gnus I don't
even notice the text/html part.
<digression>
I love those spams whose text/plain "alternative" says something like
"if you can read this, then your mail client is not MIME capable".
Because I know that I can then discard the spam without needing to
know what it's advertising in its text/html part.
</>

Agreed. I take pains to make the text/plain part as equivalent as
possible to the HTML part. I don't put a caption on every photo, but at
least use a few words to say what we did on a given day when many photos
were taken.

If the text seems interesting I could follow the link and see
photos.

Surely any decent mail client can do that from a text/plain body?

I was responding to David E. Ross's suggestion of sending only a link in
a text email. I wasn't saying you could do something in a text/plain
part that couldn't be done in a text/plain message.

But speaking of decent mail clients, at least one classmate of mine uses
Putty to ssh in and read her email in emacs. Links are not easy for her
to follow, so having news in the message itself is important.

Because of all the bad uses of HTML in email out there, I think
you've shut out of your mind the idea that there might actually be
an appropriate use for it.

Me? No, it's because I'm unwilling to devote the time to discerning
which (few) cases are bona fide versus those (many) which are abusive.

(The words in parenthesis are based on my own experience of inbound
mails [...]

I'm suprised you've encountered any bona fide cases. I thought mine was
the first legitimate use of multipart/alternative email with an HTML
part. I imagined an end to the groaning of those who put effort into
implementing multipart/alternative support in various MUAs, as I finally
put the technology to the kind of use they were probably thinking of.
If you've already encountered bona fide cases, then that was my hubris.

I'm convinced this is an appropriate use, giving a significant
advantage over plain text while maintaining a reasonable message
size.

Faking the sender address as someone known to, and trusted by, the
recipient is a routine spam/abuse trick, so you're expecting the
recipient to take time out to discern that the mail genuinely does
come from a sender who is normally trustworthy.

Routine? I do know something like that has happened with Outlook worms
in the past. I get spam through three different providers and don't see
spam that looks like it's from people I know. I do get bounces where
the sender was faked to me, but those are to addresses that I don't
know.

Anyway, that argument is against mail sent from web sites, a related
topic but not the same as the multipart/alternative question.

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Tue, 4 Apr 2006, Bruce Lewis wrote:

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@physics.gla.ac.uk> writes:

If you used simple text/plain mail, then the same thing would
happen, and I - for one - wouldn't have the bother of additionally
receiving and ignoring "alternative" text/html, which I routinely
decline to open from email.
How does Pine work to make it such a bother?

Oh, sorry - perhaps not such a good choice of words. I have told PINE
to preferentially display the text/plain alternative. The "bother"
for me is only to observe the presence of the (usually much larger)
HTML alternative, and wonder whether it's genuinely equivalent to what
I'm seeing.

If I decide to save the mail in my archive, though, I do normally
choose - in the interest of space conservation - to delete the HTML
alternative before saving it - that's easy enough, but still an action
which needs to be taken, and confirmed, as compared to not having to
do anything.
I'm suprised you've encountered any bona fide cases. I thought mine
was the first legitimate use of multipart/alternative email with an
HTML part.

I'm afraid I get emails from administrative types who are too stubborn
to take advice on email netiquette, but seem to just send in whatever
form their chosen proprietary software decides to send. Off-topic
here are those who have for many years insisted on sending a line or
two of substantive content embedded in tens of kB of useless Microsoft
Word formatting; but a proportion of them have now taken to sending
multipart/alternative, containing plain text together with the most
appalling garbage that passes for HTML in their proprietary world.

Unfortunately our campus doesn't have any kind of clearly stated rule
by which a recipient can decline to open either of the above formats.
So we're forced to treat them as bona fide, no matter what our
personal opinions might be.

cheers

[Tim]

On Tue, 04 Apr 2006 13:37:34 +0100, Alan J. Flavell sent:

I'm afraid I get emails from administrative types who are too stubborn to
take advice on email netiquette, but seem to just send in whatever form
their chosen proprietary software decides to send.

Time to reply with a lengthy HTML mail set to use the Wingdings font? >;-)

--
If you insist on e-mailing me, use the reply-to address (it's real but
temporary). But please reply to the group, like you're supposed to.

This message was sent without a virus, please destroy some files yourself.