On Jul 1, 2010, at 10:47:11, Florin Iucha wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 01, 2010 at 09:54:11AM -0500, Justin Krejci wrote:
>> I also don't see what is so bad about HTML mail in principal.
> 
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> 
> In principle, I don't see what's wrong with ponies in e-mail, as well.
> 
> 
>>                                                               Perhaps
>> various composers/implementations would be better but the principal I think
>> is very useful and effective and has made a lot of communication much easier
>> (for good or ill) for more people using the internet.
> 
> Why?
> 
>>                                                       Using HTML email is a
>> lot easier for people to communicate than plain.
> 
> How?
> 
>>                                                  People are not interested
>> in
> 
> References?
> 
> Or at least do you have a compelling argument on why it works for you?
> 
> I have asked last month for real-world examples on how HTML e-mail is helping
> people get the job done, have fun, whatever...  And I got no positive answers.
> 
> I'm still waiting.  I'm genuinely curious.
> 
> Cheers,
> florin

I'm a proponent for plain-text, fixed-width fonts in email, but we have many users who refuse to use such things, specifically a fixed-width font.  Our solution for things like tables in email is to do one of a couple things:

1) Send the email as a plain-text fixed-width format.  This works well for clients that are configured properly.
2) Provide an HTML version that builds a table and displays the same data.
3) Provide an CSV to display the data the user can open in any spread-sheet program.

IMHO, it would be easier if users would just use the plain-text, fixed width configuration by default.  This is much easier to generate.

---
Eric Crist