Dear correspondent or list member, Kindly turn off HTML attachments in your outgoing mail. They consume bandwidth and the addressee's disk space and in addition may not render at all in some readers' mail clients, or may render twice, causing plenty of annoyance. Also since almost all undesirable spam messages contain HTML attachments, many mail clients are configured automatically to filter all such messages to the trash bin. Using HTML without first obtaining your correspondent's consent may cause you to fail to communicate entirely. There is no standard for rendering HTML code so its use is appropriate only between consenting correspondents. Thank you very much for your consideration. Following are notes collected from various sources detailing how to configure your mail client to transmit in industry-standard format. I hope this information is helpful to you. OUTLOOK EXPRESS For the general case: Go to the Tools/Options/Send tab and for the Mail Sending Format select plain text. OE automatically switches to the style of the incoming message if you select Forward Message or one of the two Reply buttons. Fine if you have agreed with your correspondent to communicate this way, but if he is clueless in cyberspace, using the default HTML coding only because he knows no better, prevent this by looking in the sending options at the bottom of the same panel and uncheck "Reply to messages using format in which they were sent". If you don't uncheck it, when you reply to a message received in HTML your own message will also go out in HTML. User-by-user: You can selectively enable HTML coding by correspondent. Open the address book (Ctrl+Shift+B), then right click on the target name. Select Properties in the menu, then select the Name tab. At the bottom see the option "Send E-Mail using plain text only". Select it, producing a check mark. Once so selected, you will have an on-screen menu option to send your note to the correspondent in plain text format if you created it as HTML. Click on OK or yes. Your HTML note is converted to plain text resulting in no more HTML to that correspondent. You set this for each e-mail address you have in the Outlook Express address book. NAVIGATOR Configuration is similar to Outlook Express. Go to Edit/Preferences/ Formatting and select "Use the plain text editor" to eliminate HTML coding globally. To enable HTML on a per-correspondent basis, go to the Address Book Recipients panel and on the New Card menu check whether the correspondent accepts HTML mail. AOL The Version 6 mail client rudely defaults to HTML-coded mail. The options: (1) Use client versions 3, 4 or 5 which provide no setting to change the format but automatically transmit plain text to all non-AOL addresses and HTML to all AOL e-mail addresses. (Version 2.5 knows only plain text.) (2) If you use Version 6 and don't want to change, you may send e-mail as a plain-text file attachment. (3) Use AOL Mail via a web-browser. (4) The following method is extracted from an AOL FAQ cited below. Change global e-mail preferences (do once only) a. Go to Keyword: Preferences (or choose Preferences from the Settings menu on the AOL 6.0 toolbar). b. Click on Font, Text & Graphics Preferences. c. Click on the Reset button at the bottom of the resulting window. Do not make any changes in the Font Preferences area of the window. d. Click on the Save button. Change a specific e-mail to plain text (do for any desired message): a. Compose and address the e-mail as desired. b. Choose Select All from the Edit menu to highlight the entire message. c. With the mouse arrow somewhere over the highlighted text, click the right mouse button, revealing a contextual menu. d. Choose Normal from the Text menu. e. Send it taking care not to make any further changes to the message. Note that changing the text to normal will eliminate the "blue bar" quoted text indicator, but will not remove some HTML elements of the quoted text. The entire quoted section must be deleted (or simply not quoted in the first place), followed by the re-entry of the text quoted manually, prior to changing the text to normal. Changing the text to normal will also eliminate any styled text that would have been seen by AOL recipients of the message, which cannot be re-added. Testing also suggests that messages with hyperlinks cannot be converted to normal text, requiring the prior removal of the link. AOL FAQ: NOTES ON MAIL STANDARDS [from Simon Bowring ] The whole area of HTML mail is nothing but problematic . . . HTML has no place in e-mail clients, it was never designed to work in e-mail clients and the standards to make HTML e-mail clients interwork together consistently don't exist. HTML e-mail can *only* serve to make an e-mail client *far* more complex, more incompatible with other clients, and is a huge source of additional bugs and security holes. Basically, if you want Outlook, get it and enjoy the richness of your viruses in a nice 24pt flashing red Verdana(TM) font. >> PMMail for OS/2 was designed, on purpose, to rip HTML out of e-mail. >>I, for one, want PMMail to continue working that way. E-mail should >>be plain text, period, except for attachments. Indeed--there is no other acceptable behaviour--the fault is that some mailers think they are HTML editors, when they are not. [You already have a multi-megabyte HTML renderer and editor in IE or NS, now you want two?] HTML e-mail is without any doubt the most badly conceived feature ever built into any e-mail s/w and was only done by NS and MS as part of their "arms race" to win the web browser monopoly wars. It's yet another triumph of form over function that attempts to win market share by providing what appears to be a feature with "sex appeal", but actually abandons, misuses and perverts internet standards to the detriment of e-mail interoperability and therefore to the detriment of all e-mail users. Adding HTML to e-mail clients was an act of ignorance or wanton contempt for end-users who have every right to expect all half decent e-mail clients to interwork correctly. Sadly many people have "fallen for it", along with the bulk of the millions of Windows users who cannot be expected to know any better. Blueprint cannot afford to develop an HTML 4.0 rendering engine in their e-mail client--it's several man-years effort and just developing the engine is only the beginning, you then have to decide what to do about all the facilities that web browers have that don't make sense in e-mail, and there are no rules or standards about this, so you end up with e-mail clients from different vendors that behave differently, display the mail differently (and the very significant additional complexity will cause extra bugs and crashes which malicious people can and do expoit to crash your system and infect it with viruses). Bloatware killed the (office) applications market and MS have done their best to kill the e-mail client market too--small companies like Blueprint cannot compete with this strategy, especially if end-users are stupid or ignorant enough to buy into it. END NOTE For further technical details refer to .