Re: Replying to posts

[N. Andrew Walsh]

With all due respect, considerate is as considerate does. Shouting and screaming because you use some obscure tool that doesn't work the way 99% of the internet messaging tools in use work, and expect people to be accommodating of you, isn't considerate.

Well,  here's the part where I feel like I should put the popcorn down and step back in. See, I've had to spend no small amount of time arguing with people higher up in the various institutions where I've worked, that I can't read mails they send in proprietary formats. I had one place that would type an email message as a Word document and send that as an email attachment, because they didn't understand how email worked. And I, that annoying nerd with the Linux box, had to point out every time that I couldn't read it and got told in no uncertain terms that I would "get mail like everybody else did" and kindly asked to keep my mouth shut.

People have legitimate reasons for using programs like Mutt for mail (of course, why you'd use emacs when vim is clearly the *real* text editor [COME AT ME BRO] is beyond me), and it's not unreasonable for them to ask for some accommodation. Or, more to the point, for a third party to send a general mail asking a group to make accommodations for some of its members (for which those members did not themselves ask, likely out of exactly this considerate impulse), the only burden of which would be that some users might need to spend a little time configuring a(n admittedly terribly designed) client. 

And as you point out, there isn't really a good argument for why you *need* to use html-formatted email (unless you *need* to send all your email in Comic Sans or something, in which case I got nuthin'), so I think it's also not an unreasonable request. 

Cheers,

A