rantlet, and a question for y'all

[jennlk]

I just got an email from somebody (with a yahoo.com address) who said that she had a hard time finding my responses, and that I should "highlight my responses or put them in a different color". WTF? She very helpfully enclosed an example, which I couldn't see because I don't have HTML enabled in my mailreader -- when I looked at it in Gmail I could see the colors. (I had interleaved paragraphs, with a ">" at the beginning of each quoted line and extra lines between paragraphs, something that I've been doing for well over a decade. While not as obvious as changing colors or font, I would think that this is sufficient indication. Then again, I have been doing email for quite a while.)

How do I politely say "it's not my fault you're using a mailreader that doesn't understand standard email protocol"? Or has standard email protocol changed that much? Is there even one any more? Am I an email dodo, doomed to irrelevance because I don't use a web-based email reader?

Comments

[jennlk]

I told her that I was using a non-HTML enabled mailreader, and all of the paragraphs were the same color and font so it didn't matter what features were added to them, but that the quoted lines were indented and it was thus quite easy for me to see which were the quoted lines and which were the replies.

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

A lot of html mail readers lose the indentation, sadly! Which makes it really hard to see what's what.