Boycott Hotmail
Hotmail is really starting to make me mad.
Did you know that typical e-mail clients, when composing HTML-formatted e-mail, include two copies of the message: one that is HTML-formatted (mime type text/html), and one that has all HTML-formatting stripped away (mime type text/plain)? Whether this is a standard or not, I’m not sure; given the number of mail clients that actually do this correctly, I would expect that it should just be common practice. It’s just common sense, right — not everyone has a mail client capable of reading HTML-formatted messages.
Hotmail is the exception, of course. We already know that it defies common sense and practically every other standard in existance. It’s flakey and bounces messages randomly. Yeah, we already know this. But unlike other mail clients (including Outlook Express, I might add, which is the only mail client “officially” able to communicate with Hotmail accounts), the Hotmail web interface does not include two copies of HTML-composed mail. Not at all. In fact, it only includes the original HTML-formatted message in the body and sets the Content-type header as text/html. What the heck?
So boycott Hotmail. Go get a real e-mail account.
