[LINK] E-mail is not a platform for design

[Adam Todd]

At 10:40 AM 9/06/2007, Rick Welykochy wrote:
>to find out what Mickeysoft have done now ... I just bin these.
>(These attachments are kind of like the scourge of winmail.dat)

Don't you mean:

winmail.dat
winmail(1).dat
winmail(2).dat
winmail(3).dat
.
.
.
.
winmail(1453).dat
winmail(1454).dat

>The problem isn't going away anytime soon.

(sigh)

I already filter all XHTML messages into a separate folder and 
occasionally check to see if anything is in there.  I have to admit, 
some linkers are sending in XHTML format :)


>>Say it with me: HTML is for websites. CSS is for websites. GIFs and 
>>JPEGs are for websites.
>>ASCII means never having to say you're sorry.
>
>I find it it quite a challenge to explain and get a functional
>response and interest from my clients regarding "plain old text".

Well the user at the other end can change the fonts in most cases 
anyway.  So what difference does it make!

>They've been weaned on word processing as the only way to handle
>text. Notepad is an alien programme from outer geekspace.

My wife's not a geek, she uses Notepad!

>Looking at an email or web page in plain text format twists their heads
>right off.

I have to admit, I find web pages without a little formatting a bit 
hard to read.  Unless it's a mail archive or technical page.

People who just "wash" a page with text, tend not to even know how to 
use paragraphs and line structure, and so you get long hard to read 
dumps of ASCII that look like UUENCODED files :)

>Here is another maxim: Email is not FTP.

Ha!  Been saying that in my sig for about 15 years :)  Look back in 
the Link Archives :)

>Interesting that the longer one has been on the Net and savvy with
>its basic operations, the more one eschews Email as Web and Email as
>FTP.

God no.  I tell people if they want to send me pictures and 
documents, my ftp server is ftp.ah.net and I have a VERY VERY small 
message size on my SMTP server.

The overhead that is placed on sending files via smtp or http is 
enormous, when compared to sending it via ftp stream.

It takes me 50 minutes to upload a 3 minute film to the USA via their 
HTTP server, whereas the same film takes 14 minutes via FTP.

What a waste of bandwidth!