[Users] Text email as HTML

[Joe]

On Sun, 1 Sep 2024 20:14:56 +0200
"Jakub T. Jankiewicz" <jcubic at onet.pl> wrote:

> From time to time I got emails, some of them from big companies, with
> CSS and HTML inside text email.
> 
> Is it a bug on their side that they send the same content for both
> HTML and Text based email? 

No, its correct procedure if you absolutely must send HTML email, so
that recipients with email clients which don't render HTML, such as
Claws-Mail without an HTML plugin, can still read the message. Quite a
few Linux users use the text-based Mutt for email, as I do on my server,
which doesn't have a graphical desktop. Mutt does not handle HTML
gracefully.

Actually most of the idiots who think HTML in email is clever don't do
this, so I usually have to pick my way through utterly dreadful
machine-generated HTML to see what's going on.

> Can Claws-mail do something about this?
> Like detecting HTML content in text email?

Claws-Mail has a plugin which will approximately render HTML legibly. I
don't use it. A fair percentage of malware uses HTML to propagate, and
I'd rather not trust any HTML renderer. I'm not sure if there's
anything built-in to deal with it, Paul's reply suggests otherwise.
> 
> This is long standing issue, I don't have any example right now, but
> just read a post about Fancy plugin in Kubuntu and decided to bring
> this up.
> 
> I wonder if this is even possible to handle the case when some web
> developer sends HTML code to other person. How to decide this this
> HTML should be displayed and some don't.

If you mean code intended to be actual web pages, the right way is to
compress it into an archive and send it as an attachment. You wouldn't
generally include it inline. Most web pages will consist of a number of
files, which are most conveniently handled as an archive.
> 
> Or maybe I should contact with each sender and notify them about the
> bug?

I suspect most corporate email senders have no control at all over the
format of their messages, and probably include pre-made HTML signatures
or at least have a 'corporate format' for email, which requires HTML to
implement. I believe some email clients have an address-book
configuration which says 'don't send HTML to this recipient' but I
don't know which ones. Probably most large companies will be using
Outlook and Exchange for email, and the last Exchange I worked on was
the 2008 version. The memory has faded...

-- 
Joe