Unfortunately email is a text only medium and for reasons of
practicality and availability the administrator's have consistantly
requested that only text email is sent to the list.

Also, the list is still graciously hosted by MIT.  The last time I did
the back of the napkin calculations we use about 9GB of traffic a month.

HTML email is about 3 times larger than the same text in plain text, and
can be much larger with some email programs.  We currently use the
equivilant of an ISDN line full time, but we peak at much greater than
that.  When you send a 10k message (html reply to a reply to a reply...
etc, or small attachment) it is sent over 2000 times to various email
accounts around the world, which ends up being 20MB of data.  Even a
small 1k message is multiplied to 2MB (bytes, not bits).

So even if only a small fraction of piclisters start sending html email
it would account for a very large increase in total bandwidth.

For what it's worth, I have a cable modem and a 'modern' email progran,
but I'd still prefer that email is sent in text.  Anything else is
fluff, and honestly we ought to be coming up with another system
entirely rather than kludging new methods onto old (common, reliable,
cheap) systems.  Personally I don't care to see someone's particular
taste in fonts, layouts, pictures, backgrounds, and colors.  I just want
the meat of the message.

Plus it takes up less space on my PDA... ;-)

-Adam

Jon Baker wrote:

>I thought the majority of HTML 'enabled' mail programs sent both a plain
>text and mime encoded html version of the message- so it was fairly easy to
>either read the plain text version.. or the mime encoded version.. and ALL
>decent mail programs support mime.Maybe its just some of the web based
>mailers that dont work properly- because I've had no trouble using pine in
>the past.
>
>As for many a folk using 14.4 modems.. come on... thats no excuse.. its
>really time for an upgrade :-)
>

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics
(like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics