Carsten Schiefner wrote on 01/09/2025 16:19:
Fine by me. But "HTML only" emails with mandatory tracking pixels? I doubt that.
Looks like I'm going to exceed the recommended 1 email in 24 hours. Tracking pixels: email transport companies gain insight into the activity of the recipient. There is a privacy issue here and it would be super if the Atlas team could remove this. HTML emails: didn't we flog this horse to death in the 1990s? Well, it's a long time ago and maybe we didn't, or didn't flog hard enough, or for long enough. Also as ripe-atlas@ripe.net is the ideal forum for re-litigating this important issue: Personally I like HTML emails. Some people like text-only emails and that's fine too - we all have our likes and dislikes. However text depends on fully unstructured information which is most likely to be rendered in a proportional-spaced font on most MUAs, i.e. terribly broken by default for most people but works fine if you're in a terminal. If tabular data is being presented, then html tables provide a sensible presentation layer. I'm not so sure that the preferences of a vociferous minority who use text-only MUAs should override the UX experience of the vast majority of people who use MUAs which render plaintext using proportional spaced fonts by default. But as Carsten points out, this problem is already solved with Content-Type: multipart/alternative. If multipart/alternative presents inconsistent information, then that's a bug and it needs to be fixed. Presumably the Atlas team won't do this (but if they did, it would be an excellent troll). Also, welcome back everyone from northern hemisphere summer holidays and I'm glad to see such universal good cheer on the Atlas mailing list today, and about such important things too. 🎉🎉🎉 Nick