I honestly did not understand the full scope of this until recently returning to a corporate environment after several years of independent consulting. The clear dependence on html formatted emails, what some refer to as “rich text”, is entirely wasteful of internet bandwidth. As an example, using emails I have actually received. Given the same message located on my imap server, one saved using evolution with full html formatting intact; the other saving a plain text copy thanks to mutt (my MUA of choice):

$ du -h mail.msg.txt
4.0K    mail.msg.txt

$du -h mail.msg.html
24K     mail.msg.html

For this example, using real world sample emails, the html email is SIX TIMES larger than the plain text version. Assuming a large amount of correspondence for any given day, about 100 individual messages, the difference between 400k and 2400k starts to be noticeable, html email generating 2MB a day more of traffic. Now in all honesty, with the bandwidth available today that amount is negligible, but there are many other valid arguments against html email worth considering. Plain text email is immune to viruses, common spammer tricks like html tables and hidden text are negated, security risks from inline images and other html elements are removed, accessbility for is increased for people using screen readers and anyone who can not use a graphical interface.

Thankfully I’m not the only person who feels this way. This issue has been around for several years and deserves much more attention than it gets. The folks at the Ascii Ribbon Campaign have a nice one page overview as well more links and instructions for configuring your email client to send plain text emails.

My favorite summation of all the reasons (taken from George Dillon): HTML email can be dangerous, is not always readable, wastes bandwidth and is simply not necessary.

Not convinced? (and why would you be?). Take a look at some of the following links:

• Email is not a platform for design – Jeffrey Zeldman
• When is e-mail like a bad website? – also Jeffrey Zeldman
• HTML E-mail is STILL evil – George Dillon
• Force mail.app to display plain text by default – maxosxhints.com

Thanks for reading.

                       _
ASCII ribbon campaign ( )
 against HTML e-mail   X
                      / \

Now I’m not going to manually edit each file on each machine to have some fancy individual ascii art hostname. I don’t have time and that’s not the point, especially when there’s plenty of utilities that will do it for me.  These should all be available in your distros repositories as they’ve been around for some time.

Figlet:

The best one for this job is FIGlet, but then again, that depends on your preference. From the home page: “FIGlet is a program for making large letters out of ordinary text”. So a simple command like:

figlet -f smslant -S megatron | sudo tee -a /etc/motd

Will append this to your /etc/motd

                       __
  __ _  ___ ___ ____ _/ /________  ___
 /  ' \/ -_) _ `/ _ `/ __/ __/ _ \/ _ \
/_/_/_/\__/\_, /\_,_/\__/_/  \___/_//_/
          /___/

Nice and easy. -f decides what font to use. Typically on most *nix-en these will be in /usr/share/figlet/, but the basics are: banner, big,  block, bubble, digital, ivrit, lean, mini, mnemonic, script, shadow, slant, small, smscript, smshadow, smslant, standard and term but there are others. There are lots of other options for FIGlet,  so read the man page.

Boxes:

Boxes is  a utility designed to be called from within your editor and works really well to comment out blocks of code.  It can also be used to generate some basic ascii banners suitable for use in your /etc/motd

webframp@megatron$ boxes -d nuke -a hcvc
megatron
^D

        _ ._  _ , _ ._
      (_ ' ( `  )_  .__)
    ( (  (    )   `)  ) _)
   (__ (_   (_ . _) _) ,__)
       `~~`\ ' . /`~~`
       ,::: ;   ; :::,
      ':::::::::::::::'
 _jgs______/_ __ \__________
|                           |
|         megatron          |
|___________________________|

Tada, a nice little mushroom cloud for your login message. ^D represents your EOL character, typically Control-D, but you knew that. Again see the man page for more options.

Cowsay/Cowthink:

Cowsay/cowthink is a configurable speaking/thinking cow. It can be used to make your message appear to come from a cow:

webframp@megatron$ cowsay
megatron!
^D

 ___________
< megatron! >
 -----------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

And the hillarity ensues. Cowthink will make it a thought bubble instead of a speech bubble. Cowsay can also be combined with boxes or figlet to make your cow say or think the output of those commands. More info is in the man page.

Do you use something else? Whats your preferred /etc/motd format?