HTML Email Sucks!

[B4RSK]

HTML should stay on web pages where it belongs...

Had an email conversation with a friend tonight, and since she started with HTML mail, it stayed that way through the replies back and forth.

The messages were short, and I am not sure how many there were, but I suddenly noticed that it had reached 125KB! Replied and forced it to go to Text Only, and the size dropped to 17KB.

HTML email sucks.

Ian

 

[Mercutio]

You're only now noticing this?

elm, my text based email client, gives a count of line numbers in a mail message. For a simple email, it's usually 8 lines or so. For HTML mail it's usually 50 or so.

The worst offender is Outlook Express, because it includes both plaintext AND HTML in the same message. How moronic is that?

Anyway, things like transparent, single pixel .GIFs abound in spam, and there's always the joy of having a message redirect you to a page that does who-knows-what.

HTML should never have been allowed in email. Period.

 

[B4RSK]

I use OE actually, but I have it set to display messages in Text Only for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

I never send messages with HTML in them (formatting etc), and I never read messages in HTML format.

Why do I use OE? Because of it's seamless Unicode and Japanese support. Other clients may have caught up somewhat, but I have yet to find one that works as well. Lotus Notes at work isn't bad, but otherwise it is a pretty lousy client...

Regarding the sizes, it isn't that I only just discovered that HTML is bigger than text, but for plain text messages, I hadn't noticed that it was 7x plus bigger before... Just seemed rather extreme.

Ian

 

[i]

For what it's worth (not much), I agree wholeheartedly.

 

[blakerwry]

images and sounds in email were the driving force for html email. Otherwise we'd just be stuck with links (non clickable) and attachments.

 

[Tea]

The links are only non-clickable if your mail client doesn't know how.

 

[blakerwry]

sure, if you want to write http://www.blah.com/index5/asp/default.asp&username=blake and hope that their client is smart enough to make it a link or that the person can copy the link correctly, not to mention how it can mess up the formatting of what you want to say. Hyperlinks are a much better way to go if your link is more than just the main page of a website.

 

[Pradeep]

images and sounds in email were the driving force for html email. Otherwise we'd just be stuck with links (non clickable) and attachments.

All the better to use 1 pixel images to track you down and engulf you with spam.

 

[Mercutio]

Shoot. My email client doesn't even support MIME. And I LIKE IT THAT WAY.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

You don't need html to do links. There could have been a standard created to include links in text based e-mail. The coloring of replies and such could all be done with simple markup like bbcode. Having the full power of html is not needed.

Anyway, html e-mail isn't necessarily the problem, it is the clients that display the rendered code instead of just displaying the e-mail as plain text.

 

[blakerwry]

yes, but why invent BBCode when you already have HTML and you already have available renderers and dont have to 1) code a new renderer and 2) you dont have to increase the size of install/download size of the email program due to an included renderer

 

[Mercutio]

Several mini-rants to follow.

Maybe because of the externality of the renderer with respect to non-Email traffic? embedded 1-pixel transparent .GIFs as the perfect example of that.

HTML does not need to exist in the domain of email. If you're spending as long formatting fucking text as you are typing your thoughts then you have IMO destroyed the usefulness of e-mail as a tool. If you ARE spending that much time formatting, you've created a situation where you might as well be working with a word processor (hence outlook and word, the metaphorical bazooka needed to kill a mosquito) or a page layout program, and then you're back to basically writing a one-line plaintext message ("boss, here's the thing you wanted.")

email communication is essentially designed to be informal, as a supplement for other communication processes in an organization. Businesses almost never make any effort to retain it, at least in the US, so why spend time with formatting it?

Personally, I think all this MAY contribute in large part to the sucess of crappy proprietary IM software (like, oh, all the ones we have buttons for here), which has taken the mantle of quick and informal communication.

IM is the wrong answer, simply because the existing standards are out of date (anyone ever used ntalk or ytalk?), current IM tech will never be standardized or even interoperable (too many egos and no interest in the process by the owning parties), and proposals for future standards have no backing by anyone. The internet operating on anyone's proprietary software is a deal-breaker to me.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

yes, but why invent BBCode when you already have HTML and you already have available renderers and dont have to 1) code a new renderer and 2) you dont have to increase the size of install/download size of the email program due to an included renderer

I'm not going to deny that at the time that html e-mail caught on, html was all the rage and it may have even seemed like a good idea. Subsequent to that time we have figured out that web pages are riddled with security issues which makes rendering html e-mail dangerous.
For various reasons carrying the renderer over to the e-mail program was a bad idea. It increased the size of e-mails significantly. Suddenly you had to worry about security in an originally text only format. You carry over abstractions that cause problems because the underlying implementation wasn't designed with the requirements of e-mail in mind.

E-mail should have stayed plain text only with possibly only formatting and linking markup allowed. My e-mail should not be contacting the internet when I view it.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

Businesses almost never make any effort to retain it, at least in the US, so why spend time with formatting it?

On the contrary many businesses rely on it and do store it.

 

[Mercutio]

Case law in the US is such that if any effort is made to retain e-mail for any length of time, it can be subpena'd for retrieval, regardless of the costs involved in processing or retrieving that material, even when that cost exceeds the penalties that might be invoked by the court proceedings. Because of this, large organzations make every effort to ensure that email files don't make it do archival storage.
If your business is archiving corporate e-mail, I hope it never gets sued.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

We actually work for law firms.

 

[Mercutio]

Perhaps there's a legal requirement that law firms keep email data?

 

[Howell]

Both of the multi-(m/b)illion dollar companies I have worked for most recently included the mail servers in the backup rotations. When a suit is filed the companies must stop reusing tapes until the suit reaches resolution. That is all.

 

[blakerwry]

Aparently a suit was filed against the company my father works for and they weren't alowed to reformat, ghost, or delete any files off their machines. This includes hundreds if not throusands of desktops and hundreds of laptops. If something went wrong with a computer and they couldn't immediately fix the problem they basically had to either get a new hard drive or buy a new computer.

 

[e_dawg]

Silly rabbit, you're supposed to keep shredding until the cops burst through the door of your office!

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/DailyNews/enron_shred020121.html

 

[CityK]

There are legal requirements for some.

For example, as this article[/url]]The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requires financial services firms to store all e-mail traffic in its original form for at least three years and to make those communications "accessible" for the first two years. The National Association of Securities Dealers Inc. also has rules that require brokerages to monitor and store communications with their clients

Just think of the Sherrif of Wall Street and how many of his campaigns against brokerage houses involve the use of internal email communications from the very same firms being investigataed/prosecuted.