I believe that blake8086 was referring to the content of the hidden message when he said plain text. He is asserting that if you hide 'hidden message here' in something, you are using security by obscurity, but if you try to hide ENC('hidden message here', 'secret key goes here') you are going to make the detection of the presence of your secret message easier.
I argued against the latter point: if you hide the encrypted message in something which is normally compressed such as JPEG or DivX, the encrypted message blends in with the rest of the data because compressed data has high entropy (the better the compression, the higher the entropy). I don't get your point about security by obscurity, that's pretty much the whole point of steganography I would suppose. Security by obscurity is mostly a slogan to criticize not publishing algorithms etc.
You need to quantify "blends in". If I [an attacker] plot a distribution of the entropy in all your files, and some of them are outliers, even by a small amount, I can focus all my analysis on those files.
Please don't send HTML email, there is almost never a scenario when it is necessary. All it does is create larger emails, have redundant information (most HTML emails also send a plain text counterpart), make reading email more difficult (especially if you are using a terminal mail client or are visually impaired), and allow for obnoxious email styling.
Every one of your posts in this thread -- every single reply -- seems entirely shortsighted.
It's very obvious you've never used an opt-in email list to build and grow a commercial business.
You think Groupon (and the ilk), or Newegg, etc, would see the huge returns from email they do if they were sending out plaintext?
The only thing that really bothers me about your posts, though, is that you try to say things with such a tone of authority. But you just don't know what you're talking about.
Your argument is valid for standard correspondence. It is not valid for commercial marketing. A well-designed HTML email will look stunning in the vast majority of email clients. If marketing ROI is the goal, it is best to ignore the edge cases you mention.
I very frequently write and receive standard correspondence that benefit massively from employing appropriate use of bold, italics and bullet points.
I'm against over-using formatting, but just because some websites are ugly it doesn't mean that the web in general doesn't benefit from being marked up for presentation.
This plain-text only crusade is a sad remnant from a time when the individual bandwidth consumed by each message actually mattered and/or there was a real risk that some people for valid reasons had an e-mail client incapable of displaying HTML emails. Neither is valid any more, and what's more, there's a rich selection of quality e-mail clients available that will happily only show you the plain text version of the e-mail you're looking at: Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send.
That's a false dichotomy. In no way does the appearance of an email impact the quality of its content or vice versa. You obviously do not care about the appearance of emails (or rather, you prefer the appearance of plaintext emails), but others, like myself, do. Fortunately, any decent email system will provide the content to suit both of our preferences.
which while i understand and concur with your hatred of unsolicited sales emails, is the point of them :) much the same as ads on TV, i don't want to see then but if im going to be forced to, at least don't make them offend my eyes,
(not much can be said for badly designed marketing messages though)
If communication that you actually wanted to receive was sent in plain text then you could easily filter HTML email and be rid of it. Spammers aren't going to stop sending HTML mail because it is so useful for what they do, but no one else needs it.
This is incorrect. Just because spammers use HTML email doesn't mean HTML email is evil.
To give a very practical example, I sign up for newsletters from FontShop so I can be updated about new fonts. The email includes images to show how the fonts look. The utility of these emails would be drastically reduced if they were to use plain text.
I prefer HTML emails as they take me seconds to visually scan to see if anything is of interest. If the emails were a big wall of text, I would have to spend several minutes reading everything which is a huge waste of my time.
There's a reason why in the real world, brochures and flyers aren't done up on a typewriter. People are visual creatures and if you're running a startup and marketing products or services and you're not using HTML email, you're doing a disservice to your investors, shareholders, prospects, and customers because the vast majority of people would rather opt-in to receive emails that look good.
Taxes?