On 16 December 2014 at 14:39, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
Then don't use those to send messages to a mailing list.
There may be no other option. Also, many clients hide or fudge the status. For instance, Gmail is currently claiming that it's going to send this as plain text with no extraneous quoting. Will it do this? I won't know until I send it.
It can't. At least not in a way that I can reply to cleanly in plain text.
For all its faults, Mozilla Thunderbird can quote HTML to plain text quite well. But I'm sure there are many ways to mess up a reply to a plain text message by quoting in the standard way. That which passes for plain text is a minefield of assumptions (Your English Must Only Have 26 Characters, and Criminally Limited Punctuation) leading to naïve "markup free" limited solutions like Markdown.
So unless people don't expect replies to their email, they better not send them in html in the first place.
Unfortunately, if you're going to block replies based on e-mail format, you'll get a dwindling number of participants in the mailing list. And nothing kills off user groups like lack of participation. cheers, Stewart