Re: "Pretty" Emails

From: JupiterHost.Net (mlists_at_jupiterhost.net)
Date: 12/21/04 

Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 22:48:27 -0600
To:  beginners@perl.org

Hawkes, Mick I wrote:
> Hi all,

Hello,

> I am currently using the MIME::Lite module to send Emails,
> However my boss wants me to line the tables up better and generally pretty it up
> A bit (bold) etc.
>
> I can't use HTML as our company is still using NT4 Outlook.

Your boss wants you to format text without using the world's most
compatible and widely used formatting language??

You can "line up tables better" by formatting your plain text maybe with
printf or sprintf (perldoc -f sprinft and perldoc -f printf) but you
can't make plain text "(bold) etc" without some markup language and
since 99.999999999999 % of mail clients/computers have some form of html
interpreter then html is your best bet.

> Any ideas on a possible formatting module I can use or any suggestions at all

1) Fire your boss, he sounds kinda dumb :)

2) forget using anything else besides html to really format your
messages, anything else will be plain text or some formatting that is
not usable by 99.999999999% of mail clients

3) Kick your boss in the shin's for being so lame

4) send him to http://google.com/search?q=What+is+an+email and he will
find that an email is a bunch of plain text that is formatted into a
header and body section with the body section containing (except for
morons that send html only emails) a plain text part, maybe an html
part, and attached files, if any, encoded in base64

5) Here's a gem: use Mail::Sender its way sexxy and lets you do plain
text and html parts and attachments very very easy, just my .02

HTH :)

Lee.M - JupiterHost.Net

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