[R] Allow HTML email on R-Help

[Rich Shepard]

On Wed, 4 Jan 2012, John wrote:

> It's also a storage hog using several times the space a simple ASCII or
> UTF-8 message does.  HTML email also offers a convenient way to slip worms
> and trojans on systems.  Also, since there are various "dialects" of HTML,
> documents in one dialect may not display the same one someone else's
> system as they did on the author's.  Generally, HTML is a bad idea for
> email.

   Furthermore, it's unreadable in a text-based MUA like alpine or mutt.
Sometimes alpine's able to decrypt it and present a semi-readable message,
but most of the time I see all the tags, long meaningless strings, and other
aspects of a Web page. Trying to separate the wheat from the chaff is too
time consuming so I just delete it without reading.

   When newspapers start putting in different body text fonts, colors,
emoticons, etc. I may reconsider my position. In the meantime, unless one
grew up reading only comic books ... er, 'graphic novels', we're used to
reading text in books, newspapers, magazines, etc. as plain text.

   Yes I'm a curmudgeon, but I've earned the right to be one. :-)

Rich