I am moderator for an Ottawa activist events. The list only accepts plain text e-mail. I think this most recent attempt at explaining why to a list member was worthy of mentioning here
E-mail was invented to only handle plain text. The ability to format text (make it bold, use automatic bullet points, centering of text) was introduced latter by using the same language old web pages use to format text - html. Although it may seem beneficial to be able to structure text, it introduces many inconveniences:
- Older computers require more resources to process the e-mail
- Filtering spam becomes much more difficult (a “bizillion” times would be a fair statement, if not an understatement)
- Archiving mail takes up much more space.
The reason is that the computer requires more “information” to format that text. A word and a bold word may seem like the same thing to the human eye, but to the computer it is different:
- To you: These words may be bold
- To the computer: [b]These words may be bold[/b]
- To you: These words may be hyperlinked
- To the computer: [http://www.cjly.net/deconstructingdinner/] These words may be hyperlinked[/a]
That information about formatting has to be stored within the message, you just don’t see it.
So in the name of accessibility for all regardless of their budget and to use computing resources wisely, *everyone* should use plain text for e-mail, not just our list.
If you use Notepad, a program supplied with every copy of the windows operating system, and copy & paste from there, you will only use plain text. I don’t know what is the equivalent on Macintosh, but let me know and I’ll find out a plain text only program for you.
À la prochaine,
Julien