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**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [September 30, 2003, 8:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-html-format-emails-are-not-making-it-to-the-recipient/204660 "2003-09-30T08:23:07Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 2
**Author:**  [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [October 1, 2003, 12:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-html-format-emails-are-not-making-it-to-the-recipient/204660/21 "2003-10-01T00:04:54Z")
**amore ac studio** : I bow to your superior knowledge. 🙂
Anyway, lynx is about as innocuous as you can get in terms of web browsers posing security risks: I _know_ it can’t fetch web bugs and it can’t run Java or JavaScript. The worst it can do is accept cookies, and that’s configurable with a command-line flag (or by running Guidescope and setting lynx to use your localhost:8000 proxy).
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**Author:**  [@j.c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/j.c)\
**Post date:** [October 1, 2003, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-html-format-emails-are-not-making-it-to-the-recipient/204660/22 "2003-10-01T18:31:26Z")
If you must use HTML, then why not build special pages and then send the recipient the URL and password?
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**Author:**  [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\
**Post date:** [October 2, 2003, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-html-format-emails-are-not-making-it-to-the-recipient/204660/23 "2003-10-02T14:51:08Z")
> [@](#):
>
> It sounds like your ISP is, for whatever reason, deciding that HTML messages are spam
By definition, it is. Email is an ASCII text medium.
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**Author:**  [@Balthisar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balthisar)\
**Post date:** [October 2, 2003, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-html-format-emails-are-not-making-it-to-the-recipient/204660/24 "2003-10-02T15:07:45Z")
Email – even HTML email and items with attachments and pictures _are_ ASCII text. Have any of you ever wondered why large attachments freeze Outlook for a few seconds? Or why Entourage mutters about “encoding attachments”? This occurs because the email client is uuencoding everything that it sends. On receipt, it has to decode (uudecode) everything. Email systems are based on 7-bit characters. Since modern computers are all based on 8-bit characters, conversion has to be done so you don’t lose 12.5% of all the information.
On that note, even HTML email is straight ASCII text.
If you look at uuencoded data, you’ll see that it’s not human legible, but it will be comprised of ASCII text.
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**Author:**  [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\
**Post date:** [October 2, 2003, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-html-format-emails-are-not-making-it-to-the-recipient/204660/25 "2003-10-02T20:17:32Z")
Well, that’s like saying even ASCII text is binary.
Email should not consist of codes that are designed to be interpreted as markup language.
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**Author:**  [@Balthisar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balthisar)\
**Post date:** [October 3, 2003, 10:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-html-format-emails-are-not-making-it-to-the-recipient/204660/26 "2003-10-03T10:57:09Z")
**AHunter3** , for what it’s worth, I completely agree with you – I detest HTML/Rich-Text email myself. Except at work for internal-only communications where I can just embed an Excel sheet.
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