E-Mail as HTML (was Re: Life after PMMail)

[Dan Casey]

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On Mon, 27 Mar 2000 08:06:26 -0500 (EST), Larry Ebbitt wrote:

>On Mon, 27 Mar 2000 13:58:09 +0100, David Gaskill wrote:
>
>>I have already come 
>>across people that don't know that there is any other kind of e-mail ... 
>
>I'm sick of all this catering to the incompetent.  The web has become all
>but useless.  Now the crap is getting into e-mail.  I suppose the news groups
>are next.

Well .. I've already seen HTML in USENET News Groups ... I normally
just delete it.

What users need is education .... but they, for the most part, aren't
likely to get it. Thanks to Windows pre-loads and complete system
setups, complete idiots can now turn a computer for the 1st time, and
send and receive e-mail. And these, for the most part, are users that
have no idea what an e-mail client is, much less the Standards, Rules
and "Netiquette" that those of us who have been using the Internet
have come to learn.

I'd be willing to bet even money that if all these systems with Win9x
(or2K) pre-loaded, had the "E-Mail as HTML" set "OFF" by default,
they'd never figure out how to turn it on ... much less what it
means.

These same users, btw, probably have no idea that there exists a huge
Online Community and World ... outside of e-mail and the WWW.

And, thanks to all of these Online Services (AOL and CIS to name 2)
that have their own, proprietary "Chat" systems, (Buddy Lists, Forums
.. call them what you will), none of these "users" have ever heard of
IRC or Usenet Newsgroups. A common question I get asked by co-workers
is "My friend uses AOL ... and I don't ... can I chat with her using
her Buddy List thingy?"

Yes, you can ... tell her to get an IRC Client :-)

E-Mail (and usenet news) was designed to be transmitted in plain
ASCII Text. It's quick, functional, and most aof all, it's
completeley Cross-Platform compatible and non-proprietary.

I'll admit that I do have a few friends who don't (yet) know what to
do with a URL Link that I send them in an e-mail (yes, even the
concept of cut-n-paste is strange to them). It's not that hard to add
a <a href...> tag in the text of the e-mail for them (as I know they
use Netscape to retrieve their e-mail).


Dan Casey
President, VOICE   http://www.os2voice.org
http://members.iquest.net/~dcasey
Charter Associate Member: Team SETI   http://www.seti-inst.edu/
Warpstock 98 in Chicago: I was there!
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