No, it is *YOU* who are forcing your HTML mail on the rest of us.
Entourage creates email in HTML as the default. So it's not really
me, but Entourage. Plus, I'm not sure about Entourage, but
Thunderbird would allow a message to be send in HTML and plain text.
That way, if someone on the receiving end didn't accept HTML messages,
they'd get the nice plain text version. Wouldn't we both win
then?
Plain text is the prefered method for emails by people who know the
internet. It is efficient, safe, virus-free, will be readable by any
mail client at the other end, doesn't impose your font, size, style
preferences on others, and has far smaller risk of being filtered out by
spam filters.
Perfered method buy people that know the internet? I think that's a
stretch as I don't remember getting a vote. But I agree that there
are some advantages. I think if people are sending crazy fonts and
sizes, then they are not in a business setting. Or they need some
best practices guidelines.
HTML messages are generally two to four times larger for the same
message than plain text equivalents. That means not only do they take
longer to transfer over the net, contributing to network congestion,
they also take up more disk space on your computer, on the recipient's
computer, and on every server they hit along the way!
Size is hardly an issue here. Unless someone is cramming HTML
messages full of funky junk, they are not that much larger. Ok 1k to
4k, that's bigger, but that's still 4k. Put one Microsoft Excel
document on there and it'll balloon up much faster. Have you ever
seen an Excel document go from 100k to 4MB? I see it way to often.
But that's another fun topic.
With HTML messages, the people who receive the messages have little or
no control over the text font, size, and style. They must read th
message in whatever font, size, and style *you* set when you created the
message. Plain Text messages, on the other hand, display in whatever
font, size, and style the recipient wishes.
Some email clients can override font settings on HTML messages. Not
sure about Entourage though. Or, as stated before, some you can
accept just the plain text version.
HTML email is dangerous because it may contain links to external sites
that will do malicious things. For instance, a spammer can include a
link to an image, but this link contains a tag as data. The server at
the other end will get that request when your *read your email* and
based on the tag, will be able to confirm that you've read the email and
not only flag your email address as active/good, but also use your IP
with geolocation servers to assign a location code so that they can then
sell your email address to other spammers along with your general
location. If everyone stopped sending HTML emails, everyone would block
it, and then spammers would be left with very few means to escape spam
filters because their messages would have to b simple and without tricks.
First off, if you are automatically loading images on every email you
get, then you are asking for trouble. By default, Entourage, or most
any email clients, don't load images unless you hit a button to allow
them to load. If you allow all images by default, or just clicking on
the 'allow' link no matter what, then it's your own fault for loading
images in a message that is from some Bob in the UK who says you won
like 4million dollars.
Second, if we all stopped using HTML emails, then spammers would find
another way. They are quite the resourceful bastards.
HTML email is wasteful, dangerous, and rude, IMO. It's just plain evil.
I'm not quite sure who sent you all this crap email, but you do make
some good points. I don't want to send ugly, font ridden, big ass
emails, I just want to do some bolding, add some links to keyword
phrases for reference and be happy. Plain text is very restricting
and Entourage already gives us most HTML features, and defaults to
HTML formatting, why can't they just add the ability to link?
Jr you are entitled to your own opinion and I do respect that. But
there are more than one side to this issue. I don't mean to argue,
just try to shed some light on things from my side of the issue.
