I read the first paragraph and it seemed about right to me: there are many standards at play and many implementations of varying quality; lots of folklore, poss

I read the first paragraph and it seemed about right to me: there are many standards at play and many implementations of varying quality; lots of folklore, possibly false, makes the rounds and some of the more important providers are, by reputation at least, known to be difficult; one has to deal with issues of scale and stability and atomicity and reliability; there's spam. In other words, no shortage of interesting if often maddening problems to work on here. Then I saw that this was all just about formatting HTML mail. Oh.