Closed Bug 47140 Opened 24 years ago Closed 24 years ago

Default should be text email not html email.

Categories

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Account Configuration, defect, P3)

Product:
SeaMonkey
Component:
MailNews: Account Configuration
Type:
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: mozilla, Unassigned)

References

Details

When creating a new account the default should be text email, not html email. The very first thing that I do when creating an account is turn of the html. Several others in #mozilla have expressed interested in this too. If you post html email to most of the mailing lists I'm on you'll flamed by many people. The main problem with html is that not everyone uses a client capable of displaying html including me.
We put much work into the html composer, and it's just better, even for plaintext. E.g. - if you recieve a format=flowed mail and reply to that, the quote won't flow in the plaintext composer, but the HTML composer. Flowing quotes are one of the major intentions of format=flowed (see RFC2646). - lists IMO, a better solution would be to - hide UI for (presentational) formatting in the html composer and/or - set the default in the askSendFormat dialog to plaintext The problem is that we won't be able to convince Netscape to follow us. See discussion "Assuming "plain text" or "html mail".." on .mailnews <news://news.mozilla.org/37FA67D5.C902C699@netscape.com>. That's why I tried to hack compromises together, e.g. TXT->HTML->TXT conversions and bug 38433. But possibly failed, because they might be disabled by Netscape again. :-((( As things stand, we propbaly need to reopen the discussion :-(((. Please post comments as followups to the thread mentioned above.
yeah.. what ben said. as we have no plans for this, I'm marking wont fix.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 24 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
I didn't think this bug would get very far. Also, just wanted to point out the following about 1/3 of the way down on http://www.mozilla.org/community.html: "Post HTML at your own risk. Keep in mind that not everyone uses mail or news readers that can easily display HTML messages. Consequently, you will reach a larger audience if you post in plain-text. Many people simply ignore HTML messages, because it takes a nontrivial amount of effort to read them."
David, in the mindset of the HTML supportes, mailinglists and newsgrups are for "advanced users" which can easily switch to plaintext. (Not taking into account that new users might send mail to "advanced users" using plaintext mailers, of course.)
not to mention that - most mail clients support HTML mail now, as do all webmail services. The biggest mail client that does not is the AOL client.. so for most people, it's actually no more work to read html mail than it is to read text mail. - our default for news is to have HTML mail off, part of trying to be a good usenet citizen
alecf: there are still plenty of folks around using older clients. mozilla should adhere to the IETF credo of "Be conservative in what you generate, but liberal in what you accept," so HTML needs to not be the default. I'm not sure why you bring the news comment up here; that's orthogonal.
Status: RESOLVED → REOPENED
Resolution: WONTFIX → ---
I'll find you statistics if you want but around the time we shipping Communicator 4.5 (Nov 1998), the statistics were something like - 40% Netscape Messenger - 25% Outlook and variants - 20% Eudora - 15% "other" now, since then, webmail (all variants of which of which support HTML mail) has become much more popular, and I can only imagine that the number of HTML mail clients has gone UP. I continue to disagree that it should be plaintext by default. (I brought up news just so people didn't think that the ENTIRE client does HTML mail by default, it's just mail) I'd also like to point out that like communicator 4.x, if you don't add any rich text formatting to your message, it gets sent in plaintext, format=flowed marking WONTFIX again, because we're not going to change this. Nobody on the mail team (i.e. the module owners) agrees.
Status: REOPENED → RESOLVED
Closed: 24 years ago → 24 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
according to GVU's surveys, 73.5% of users used HTML-mail capabable clients as their primary client as of October, 1998, It's been almost two years since that date. Now some suppositions: According to the survey, 14% of users chose "Other" which seems to include webmail since webmail was not an option on the survey. Let's make a wild guess and say half, or 7%, of "Other" was webmail. (Emacs, Pine and "Unix" were also options, and are not included in "Other") Since then, the webmail market has exploded.. even if it's only 3 times the size it was then (and I'm sure it's bigger) then the 80%+ that used web mail in October 1998 is probably closer to 90% now. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-1998-10/graphs/technology/q71.h tm
How about defaulting to multipart/alternative? For those with HTML capable browsers it should show the HTML equivalent, while others will see the text version.
Status: RESOLVED → REOPENED
Resolution: WONTFIX → ---
Ok, if people refuse to leave this as wontfix, I'm reassigning this to nobody@mozilla.org. The system we have works quite well, and we've been using it in communicator 4.x since day one with very few complaints. I personally believe multipart/alternative is unnecessary.
Assignee: alecf → nobody
Status: REOPENED → NEW
Defaulting to multipart/alternative is a completely separate issue -- it's to do with how messages which are already in HTML are *sent*. This bug is whether messages should be *composed* in HTML (by default) to begin with. Meanwhile, here's an interesting factoid: I know of two Webmail services which support HTML message composition (Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail) -- but both of them default to plain text.
Posted my comments <news://news.mozilla.org/37FA67D5.C902C699@netscape.com> to the thread mentioned above. I don't want to discuss a topic as controversary as HTML vs. plaintext in a 5-line-<textarea>.
I agree with defaulting to plaintext. Email was never designed to be marked up. People sending whole webpages drives people with low bandwidth connections insane (downloading 100k+ emails). Plain text is the default for almost all readers (and as far as I know, all webmail clients).
The default should definately be plaintext. I *constantly* hear people complain, and rightly so, on mailing list about the stupidity of having e-mail clients set to sending HTML messages by default. Newbie users should be guided into using good e-mail practices, not bad ones. Getting flamed for using that "damn Mozilla mailer" will not make anyone happy.
I agree to having the plaintext default, but I'm changing the severity to minor because this is just an argument. Take it up in #mozilla or #mozillazine.
Severity: normal → minor
agreed - this is a subjective argument not a bug. I'm really really really tempted to mark this invalid or wontfix again. But I won't because everyone seems to take some pride in having it open.
> according to GVU's surveys, 73.5% of users used HTML-mail capabable clients as > their primary client Don't want to heat it up again, but I just noticed an interesting fact while reading the spam: You said "primary client". If the user uses *any* client the is not HTML capable (e.g. a simple webmail app on vacation, or a Palm), he propably doesn't want to recieve HTML mails. Even *if* the user uses HTML-capable clients only, he might still not like HTML mails, because he prefers to determine the look himself, and current clients don't allow that (to a large enough extend) for HTML mails.
removing myself from the CC because I'm tired of SPAM from something that isn't a bug.
A thought. Would it make sense to have the _installer_ ask the user what this pref should be and then set it accordingly? I know far too many people who send HTML email because they simply do not realize that this pref is set and do not know where to change it... An install-time default setting would help with that. It could also allow admins of multi-user systems to easily set a default policy for the entire system. Just a thought.
As nice as an installer option would be (it has been suggested to have it for the default skin, for example) I think it would be a generally unwise idea to make the installer offer these options. Either way, the installer would need to have a default itself, and... ;-) The real solution here is to make this default easy to change -- which I assume it already is -- and then let distributors change this default. As mentioned earlier, if an organisation was to release this product, they could change the default options. If Microsoft wanted to release a Mozilla distribution, they could change the default when distributing their version. If we did 'fix' this bug, we would surely have as many people complaining that the default should be HTML mail as we do here saying it should be text. FWIW, my personal opinion is that I prefer to _receive_ text e-mail. But I use Pine, and Pine can read HTML e-mail, so I am not worried either way. Marking WONTFIX. If you think Mozilla should use 'text' as the default then please contact drivers@mozilla.org (cc'ing me and everyone on this bug's cc list) asking them to make an Executive Decision on mozilla.org policy. I would assume they would defer to the module owner, who has said that the default is fine as is. If you think that _Netscape_ or some other distributor should change the default in their future distributions, take it up with the relevant people inside those organisations (and not on this bug).
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 24 years ago → 24 years ago
Keywords: verifyme
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
Keywords: verifyme
> Marking WONTFIX. Hixie, it's not your business to close Mailnews bugs as WONTFIX, especially when people like dmose, mpt, me and many others on the newsgroup vote for fixing it. But it won't reopen, because I don't want to start things all over again at the moment. > and then let distributors change this default. Sure, they can, but that's completely irrelevant to this bug. > then please contact drivers@mozilla.org No, if anything, drivers are the "delivery crew", not the decision makers. The Mozilla community has the final say. Look in the n.p.m.mail-news archive, how the community voted.
*** Bug 63100 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 99738 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 129419 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Why not have an "Advanced" option on the Profile manager which gives more options such as this text one? Or a different path, through the profile creation process, beginner / "standard" / advanved etc? JG Just my 2 cents
jg@jguk.org: that's bug 115439, "Mail Wizard should let you choose either html or plain text as default".
*** Bug 196851 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 198733 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Product: Browser → Seamonkey
Windows XP Service Pack 2 changes the default settings of Outlook Express to be more secure. Now its message composing mode is Plain Text Mode. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/sp2email.mspx Mozilla also should change the default setting. This may be a "highlight" of Thunderbird 1.1.
*** Bug 281397 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 318343 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
dammit, why are the responsible people ignoring bugs which are of relevance to the entire internet community? HTML mails are a pestilence!
*** Bug 360894 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Perhaps a compromise would be to have the default text, but then on the Options menu have a "Compose as HTML" setting people could tick if they wanted that particular email to be HTML. (I'm running Thunderbird now, the menu is called Options there, but it might have a different name in MailNews) Cheers Jon
What we currently have is a compromise. This is a very old discussion, see netscape.public.mozilla.mail-news, autumn 1999. The compromise is: HTML editor, because it's much more comfortable even for composing plaintext (lists etc.). On Send, check whether formatting is used. If there's no formatting, send as plaintext without asking (so the default *is* plaintext already). If there's formatting that can be converted without information loss (bulleted lists, links etc.), ask user and default to and explicitly recommend plaintext. If there are colors, text sizes and stuff, which cannot be converted to plaintext, ask user, without explicit recommondation, but even then it defaults to plaintext. So, we are *not* defaulting to HTML in *any* case, we *are* defaulting to plaintext. And re last comment: This option exists, it's Options|Format.
Ben, i didn't know this, about the html option actually sending plain text if it could. This is cool. Perhaps this feature should be documented somewhere and the label for "compose messages in html format" be renamed to "send mail in html format if needed" or something like that. Maybe an extra option could be created, so both would read like this. [x] Use html editor to compose mail [x] Only send mail in html if needed
Hi Ben, This sounds good. However the HTML compose window isn't up to scratch IMHO yet. For instance trying to edit a reply, which is a reply to a previous email results odd indenting. The editing and removal of several depths of text is difficult and prone to leaving one persons comments indented as though the other person said it. Take for example this level of indenting: > [...] > >> Indent >> Indent >> > > Test > Test > The plain text compose window gives full control to the user, and allows me to remove select lines without pulling other lines of text onto the back of someone else's comments etc. Cheers Jon
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