[lug] Fixed-width fonts for email?

[Hugh Brown]

Jeffrey Haemer wrote:
> Do you still use fixed-width fonts to read email?
> 
> I occasionally get email that contains ASCII graphics.  That won't work as
> intended in my typical mail client (Gmail).   My early email clients (mail,
> Mail, mailx, ...) were fixed-width, but those haven't been my primary
> clients for years.

> So, how about it?  Does your default mail reader still format the box,
> below, as a box, with nice, lined-up edges and corners?  Just curious.
> 
> +----------------+
> | THIS IS A BOX. |
> +----------------+
> 
> (And yes, I know I *could* make Gmail use fixed-width fonts.)
> 
> 

One of the first things I do to thunderbird is force all my outbound 
messages to plain text and set the viewer to be plain text only.  It 
makes all of the bogus http links easy to spot and I find that only 
about 0.5% of html messages that I get are ever anything I'm interested 
in (which don't render correctly as plain text).

I have found that a few mail clients have started doing multipart with 
the "real" content as html and putting a note in the text portion that 
says essentially "we couldn't be bothered to care about you text only 
types. Go get a mail client that does html by default," though it is 
done with more tact.

I also use mutt daily.

Hugh