[ale] HTML Mail (was: Re: ink expired?!?!?)

[Christopher Fowler]

Agreed.  I would also like to add that you should remember this when
buying printers off eBay.  Especially inkjet.  I've heard that the shelf
life of a printer's head with ink is 6weeks after last print.  If you
print something and wait longer than 6 weeks there is a chance the heads
will be clogged.

In 1999 I bought an Epson off eBay and the heads were clogged due to
this reason.  There was ink in the printer but it had been a long time
since the original owner printed.  Usually this means throw it away but
Epson was nice and fixed it free. I just had to ship it to them.

I only own Epson inkjets for the main reason I guy buy cheap ink for
them.  I don't print photos either.  Simply documents.  I leave the
photos to the Fuji Frontier system at Wolf Camera.



On Fri, 2007-01-12 at 18:04 -0500, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-01-12 at 16:30 -0500, Jim Popovitch wrote: 
> > Perhaps it wasn't the mfgs attempt to screw their customers, but rather
> > an effort to reduce support costs involved with folks who only printed a
> > few pages here and there, then 2 years later complained that ink from
> > their original ink cartridge had dried and clogged the printer head.  I
> > would bet that if you read up on ink cartridges there is probably some
> > notes on recommended usable life span, after all they do come in some
> > pretty environmentally protected packaging and probably can sit around
> > open for decades.
> > 
> > BTW, What is up with all the HTML emails these days?
> 
> That is probably a good question.  There is a great deal of argument
> both for and against HTML mails, and I wouldn't use it at all if
> Evolution was bad at building the text/plain message component when
> sending messages that are text/html.
> 
> That having been said, I am using it because it is easier to use one
> style for writing mail rather than two.  My school forums and e-mail
> require the usage of HTML mail.  Now, while I don't agree with the way
> that everyone uses HTML mail, I can see that there are merits to using
> it, and every day that goes by, bandwidth becomes less and less
> expensive.  I used to be opposed to HTML mail because of its more than
> doubling the size of a message, because at that time, most people
> joining the Internet were using messages without MIME and thus using
> text/plain for their mail.  Then again, that was also a time with
> ASCII and the various ISO-8859 encodings were the end-all, be-all, and
> more often than not it was plain ASCII.
> 
> Today, though, I don't see much of a reason to not use HTML mail, at
> least if one isn't using a brain-dead client to compose it.  Evolution
> at least attaches a text/plain section that uses the standard old
> formatting rules for text messages to create the effects of bold and
> italic and underline for people who prefer to read the text/plain
> section of the e-mail, as I recall.  HTML has become something of a
> standard itself with more than just the World Wide Web, as well; it is
> used in instant messaging clients and in the mail clients that the
> majority of the world uses.  Before I started with school and had a
> strict requirement to use HTML messages there, I also found that
> people seemed to respond better to HTML messages.  Probably because
> they can be, when used properly, more readable than their text/plain
> counterparts.
> 
> Also, I tend to use UTF-8 in messages, because I like to take
> advantage of the typographical and mathematical characters that exist
> in Unicode.  I do recall being asked to avoid non-ASCII UTF-8 on this
> mailing list, though, and so I attempt to refrain from using it when I
> am writing a message here.  (The characters I usually use are the
> open- and close-quotation marks, both single and double, the ellipsis,
> the em dash, and arrows (like ? for explaining menu options).  Since
> UTF-8 is the default encoding on most of the Web (rather, most of the
> web that I use), and GNOME makes it easy to use UTF-8, so I use it.
> 
> In the end, to each their own, at least to me.  I certainly have
> annoyances about the way some people use HTML mail, but I don't find
> it annoying within itself.  Those who want to use text/plain, of
> course, can read the text/plain segments of my messages.  After all,
> that's why they are there.  :-)  There are plenty of arguments that
> can be given for using both.  I think that the world is moving to HTML
> and UTF-8, in the long run, and I figure that I might as well just use
> it everywhere so that I can use my client uniformly wherever I post.
> 
>     -- Mike
> 
> --
> Michael B. Trausch
>                    fd0man at gmail.com
> Phone: (404) 592-5746
>                          Jabber IM:
>                    fd0man at gmail.com
>              fd0man at livejournal.com
> Demand Freedom!  Use open and free protocols, standards, and software!
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