[Kde-pim] [KDE Usability] Terminology Change: "HTML" -> "Rich Text"

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Wednesday 10 July 2013 16:38:53 Marc Deop wrote:

> Why don't we do it the other way around? I mean, enable "Rich Text" by
> default and give the power users the option to write in Plain Text.

> To be honest, nowadays 99% of users expect the email client to be able to
> handle <b> or <a> tags without actually having to write them (I think it's
> called WYSIWYG "what you see is what you get" or something like that).

The reason that "power users" prefer plain text over HTML is not because they 
hate good looking mails, it is because they are aware of the negative 
implications of HTML mails on security and privacy.
I am a researcher in the field of "usable security", specializing on 
potentially dangerous emails (e.g. phishing or other scams), so I know that 
actually, HTML mails are more dangerous to "regular users" (we mostly call 
them "novices") than "power users" (which we mostly call "experts"). Experts 
know that they should look to the status bar to see what a link in an HTML 
mail really points to before clicking it, novices don't. They think "If it 
looks like PayPal, it must be PayPal", since they are not aware that a fancy 
layout can be copied and pasted with a few keystrokes. And I didn't even 
mention privacy issues with remote content (which novices do not know anything 
about either).
Though all this has more to do with receiving than with sending HTML mails, it 
still shows that the shift towards HTML mails in general is detrimental to 
security and privacy. So, just because others don't care about those topics 
and think it's a good idea to push for HTML mails, does that mean we have to 
do the same?

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