Life after PMMail

[David Gaskill]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2000 12:17:49 +0200, xavier caballe wrote:

> Maybe we are right, but we have to accomodate to the majority... 
>otherwise, we'll be wrong.

Xavi,

Most of the people on this mailing list know a great deal more about 
computing than I do; that being said I know a lot more about computing 
than many people do and if I want to communicate with these people then, 
as you say I, I have got to do it in a way that they can understand. 

This was brought home to me recently when I needed to send out 
formatted and illustrated documentation to those that responded to an 
invitation to a sporting event. After thinking about it I offered those that 
responded the documentation as an attachment in one of three formats. 

1. Word 97 

2. Pdf 

3. Zip file containing html 

For those that didn't have it I offered to provide simple instructions for 
downloading Acrobat Reader. 

It turned out that there were quite a few respondents who couldn't use any 
of these alternatives. 

There were some that apparently couldn't deal with attachments at all. The 
downloading and installation of Acrobat defeated most of those who tried 
it. There were plenty that couldn't unzip a zip file. 

I did contemplate getting another e-mail client that could send fully fledged 
html rather than the fairly basic html e-mail of which PMMail is capable. I 
wasn't sure how many people would have mail client that would be able to 
display it properly and in any case I really didn't want to spend time 
learning another mail client. 

In the end I put the whole lot up on a website. I did this with some 
trepidation because I was concerned that my mailbox would become 
jammed with e-mail from those with time on their hands,  a computer, and 
a variety of mental illnesses. (In fact it worked quite well and some of the 
e-mail from the mentally deranged was quite funny). I did contemplate 
password protection but decided there this would probably be too 
complicated for some.

The nearest thing to a common format is undoubtedly html and if people 
need, or more importantly, want to send formatted or illustrated documents 
then increasingly they will do so via html e-mail. I have already come 
across people that don't know that there is any other kind of e-mail ... 

David




David