Re: off-topic?

["Roodwriter@core.com" <Roodwriter@core.com>]

James D wrote:

> Lute Kamstra wrote:
> 
>> James D <nospam@please.no> writes:
>> 
>>> I often see people posting to newsgroups messages that include some
>>> bold, underlined or italic characters in the body of their text(?)
>>> messages. I use emacs as my external editor in kmail. How could I do
>>> the same?
>> 
>> Try surrounding words with * characters to get *bold*, _ to get
>> _underlined_ and / to get /italic/ text.
>> 
>> Lute.
> 
> Fine, this works for Knode but that does /not/ work for kmail which is the
> mail client I use. Does this work only for newsreaders? Do you know of any
> easy-to-use mail client which supports these nice features? Thanks again.
> James D

I thought you were talking about newsreaders. My mistake.

I don't believe (I could be wrong) that there's a way to do this with KMail. 
Why? Because it would take HTML. For security reasons a lot of people don't 
want HTML in their mail. Unless the newer version that comes with KDE 3.1 
(I use 3.0) has changed, KMail has a toggle allowing you to READ HTML mail 
if you want, but there's no way to SEND it. Unless you do it as an attached 
file. Attaching a file, though would give you other options, such as 
sending it as a PDF.

The reason for not wanting HTML in your mail is that someone could send you 
an e-mail with code in it that could set off an attached virus without you 
even executing the file. I don't know how prevalent these are, though. Plus 
the overwhelming majority of viruses are written for Windows, not Linux.

And there are people that lament the additional usage of bandwidth just to 
make the message colorful. I don't find this argument compelling but I do 
have security concerns.

I also don't know if there are other Linux e-mail programs that allow you to 
send HTML mail. Some of the others I looked at didn't appear to. But things 
change and my distribution is a year old.

--Rod

-- 
Author of "Linux for Non-Geeks--Clear-eyed Answers for Practical Consumers" 
and "Boring Stories from Uncle Rod." Both are available at 
http://www.rodwriterpublishing.com/index.html

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