Some History

Chances are very good you're here because some email you attempted to submit to one of this system's users bounced back to you. Chances are also good you had no idea of how, what, when, or why it did, or even what "HTML email" is. This webpage will (hopefully) educate you as to what it is and why it's so obnoxious as to compel systems (like ours) to outright reject HTML email submissions.

Since the dawn of the Internet, way back before personal computers were even available to the public at large, email has been an efficient and effective communication tool. Its strengths are its small size, compact representation, and universally accessible format, that is, plain text. The beauty of email was that you could use any old tool to read it - some tools were barebones, little more than "copy" commands straight off of the mailer pipe, while others were fancy and had a warchest of features. But no matter which tool you used, the essential and most important part of the message was transparently accessible to both the sender and the receiver.

Now the fateful year of 1995 rolls around, and a not-so-small and very anti-social outfit in Redmond, Washington (USA) has just shipped Windows 95. Not content to dominate the desktop operating system market, its not-so-scrupulous chairman decides to subvert and pollute some standards that have existed for over 20 years with his own special standards, which not surprisingly, are only legible [in an uncluttered manner] with HIS products! (I'll bet you were SO surprised.) The end-result of this ended up being far worse than just satiating one man's greed, it created an impression amongst email program authors that software without this broken behaviour was somehow defective or inferior. Worse still, his software was shipped to send out email by default in this way.

Come on, you're just picking on Microsoft...

While many people have jumped on the let's-bash-Microsoft bandwagon over the past year since the US Department of Justice judgement was released, the problem is no longer a Microsoft problem, but a problem borne of insufficient education as to how bad inline-HTML emails are. The essential issue is that for the first time in over 25 years, email is no longer universally accessible and an efficient form of communication over the Internet. The various and sundry problems with inline-HTML emails include:

• Messages are more than DOUBLE their original size, even if no special formatting or graphics are ever used.
• Style/HTML formatting is dumped within a message body which is advertised to be solely "plain text".
• They are an easy carrier for all kinds of evil trojan horses and virii which can be executed without the email-reader even being aware of it. Some of these can activate even if the user never reads the email!!
• The sender is placing unreasonable demands on the reader as to how to view his incoming email, and what clients (programs) he can use to do so.

To give you an idea of what inline HTML mail looks like to people who do not use one of these "enhanced" mail-clients, an actual clipping of HTML email is presented below in exactly the same presentation a user of a plain-text email client would see (this is unmodified in content):

Sheesh, that's UGLY!

No kidding. Now do you understand why this is such a bad thing? Almost three times the size, and it's basically a garbled mess unless you happen to use a specific class of email software. There are NUMEROUS reasons why people would deliberately NEVER use such email clients for their day-to-day email tasks, not the least of which it is entirely against the spirit and purpose of email to murk it up with inline formatting garbage. The biggest irony of all of this is that even though many users have this HTML formatting enabled, they do not style their emails with any special formatting which would require HTML to begin with!!! Not only are people wasting bandwidth and using a non-standard method of communication which only certain clients can properly decode, but they aren't even using the formatting functions this "feature" is providing to them!!!

You don't need to give up being able to send pictures, documents, or programs via email. There has been a standard for that since nearly the beginning of email. HTML mail clients didn't add that, nor do you need to make use of inline HTML to include any of those things. You can still email any file, pictures, or document with Plain Text email clients using attachments as you always have been able to do.

OK, OK, OK, but how do I turn it off?

This is fairly straightforward, though it does vary from client to client. Since Microsoft unleashed this foul non-standard upon the world, I will focus on their mail client which is called Outlook Express for both Macintosh and Windows platforms. Other mail clients have HTML formatting, alas, but the spirit of what I am about to describe will be the same.

Outlook Express 5.0 for Microsoft Windows

(a part of Internet Explorer 5.0)

The setting for HTML email can be found in the the Tools menu as shown:

Outlook Express 5.0 for Windows Menu Selection

Once you've selected the Options item, you will be presented with a multiple-pane settings window. You will want to select the Send section as illustrated, and click the Plain Text setting for Email.

Outlook Express 5.0 Options Window

Other versions of Outlook Express/Internet Mail for Windows

The setting for HTML email can be found either in the Mail menu or the Tools menu, selected under the item Options... Once that panel is open, click on the Send tab, and you should see a panel that looks a bit like this:

Outlook Express/Internet Mail Settings Panel

You should setup your sent mail settings as shown above, and then click OK until you are back to the main screen. At this point, you have successfully configured your client to never send HTML-in-emails, and you will be able to send emails to our users without any further impediment. YAY!

Outlook Express/Internet Mail for Macintosh

This client is quite similar to the Windows version, however there are many subtle and not-so-subtle differences, but fortunately those don't matter much and are far beyond the scope of this document. You can access the Preferences item in the Edit menu, which brings up a multiple category configuration panel as follows:

Macintosh Outlook Express Mail Settings Panel

A word of thanks...

We're really not trying to be needlessly difficult or yet-another-Microsoft-naysayer, because this problem has grown far beyond just Microsoft's. Eudora, Netscape Communicator, and other clients feature inline-HTML-email capabilities. They will all have settings to disable HTML formatting; if you are not using Outlook Express, please read through your program's settings and consult with its documentation to find out where to disable this setting. In our experience, the vast majority of those who have HTML enabled are Outlook Express users, so the above examples should pertain to most of you.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and reconfigure your mail software. It is for the best, and you will not experience any loss of functionality, features, or any of the fun experience of the Internet you have come to enjoy. Consider this being socially responsible, much in the way of taking the trash out to the roadside for collection or keeping your driveway clear of broken glass. It's the RIGHT THING to do.

P.S.: The maximum size e-mail accepted by our system is currently 2,000,000 characters. If you need to send us larger files, please use FTP.

The System Administrator