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formating in sendmail

Date: 2002/01/29 10:38

Q:
I have designed a nice looking confirmation notice of an RFQ.
Unfortunately some browsers (most notably AOL) don't like to receive HTML
formatted email. Is there a reliable way to know whether or not the
recipient can receive HTML email?

My current solution will be to branch the PERL script if an email address
includes @aol and send a plain text version, but I'd like to think there
is a more elegant solution.

*NAME-DELETED*
A:
Being able to receive an HTML eMail depends on the mail client (and not a
browser btw). When you send me a mail today, that I am going to download
and read tomorrow, how would you tell what client software I start to
download my mail. I can use at my will Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora,
pmail, pine, bat just to mention a few of the many hundreds of mail
clients available and used on the market.

You may believe that I use AOL mail reader, but tomorrow morning as I wake
up I hear bad news from the radio and I change my mind and us a different
mail reader.

Summary: you can not tell what mail reader client the user will use when a
mail is delivered. Mail deliverey is delayed sometimes a few days thus it
is quite different from Web page generation where you can generate a page
while the user is logged on and tells you a lot of things about the
browser it uses.

Regards,
Peter

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