Apple email rich text but what about html ?
 

Is there a way in the mail program to tell it to be html email ?

The fonts, colors, jpegs, etc... are fine in rich text but I prefer html...

for example in yahoo mail I like to be able to compose mail with a bold or jpeg embedded in the letter....

If you use rich text and read this mail composed by apple email it will not have any text attributes and any pictures show up as attachments.

I was hoping it could be told to adhere to html email.

I would use straight yahoo but safari doesnt let the yahoo mail use these extra features only windows with ie will have this.

If anyone here uses yahoo mail and a mac and then use your email account on a pc you'll know what I mean....

Read this hint: click.

Per the hint above - yes MailPictures does allow you to send html, unfortunately - of 6 users I sent a simple test html email too - on various platforms using various email clients. Only the one user with OS X Mail.app was able to actually see the html. The rest saw junk. This also happens if I include a simple graphic in an email - like a jpeg or gif. Sad sad sad.... Mail.app is apparently using some encoding scheme that is non-standard.

Well I fixxed the problem of sending html email.

I loaded Mozilla 1.5 and used it emailer. Works great for html email. Why did'nt Apple just allow this option to be put in? Maybe panther will...

The reason for html email some have pondered..?

Well a lot of people I know just cant handle email attachments, they have no clue how to pull them . So when I want to send a picture with a caption to someone, it will show up in a way that they can instantly see the pic as well as what I have to say, no fuss no muss. Its kinda stupid to read an email commenting on a picture they have yet to look at in the attchments box......

The other guy made a good point, this is how Apple sends use the new music Tuesday ads. So what are they doing using a third party email app ?

Anyway Mozilla 1.5 if you need to compose an email with html.....

I'm the party pooper.

HTML mail sucks hard. Anyone serious about security or privacy (cough, spam, cough) sets his or her e-mail client never to render HTML in e-mail messages. Even better, he or she will set up the client to bounce it back to the sender with a polite "no HTML mail, please, for the sake of the Internet" message attached.

Flame on.

Mikey-san - while I don't use HTML mail very often, there are occasions where for me it is completely appropriate. I refuse to cave in to not using html becuase spammers use it. Sure they do. They also use email - I'm not gonna stop using email because spammers use it. HTML email in its essence is basically a good technology that has been exploited. I refuse to give it up to the exploiters, instead preferring to fight for the right to use it when and if I want to. By giving up I am admitting defeat to the spammers and that empowers them.

Just delete it.
 

No flames from this corner. I hate HTML email too. All of it. I don't care if it comes from my most beloved family member - I hate it.

With that said, I don't think that an automatic bounce is the best way to deal with the issue. Spammers often use forged headers, meaning that the bounce can be sent to an innocent victim whose email address was used. The bounce does absolutely no good in this situation, and it actually magnifies the negative impact that spam has on the Internet in general. Until something better comes along, I submit that simply deleting the unwanted mail is the best practice. It's going to take something more sophisticated than bounced messages to stop the spam problem.

-- Rob

I was talking about more of Mail's "bounce" button. Use it when it's obvious, don't when it isn't.

Down with HTML mail:

http://dustman.net/andy/HTMLMail

Thats a very nice example of bad HTML email - but only indicative of HTML created with Microsoft Word.

So let me ask you - if you want to send a photo to someone (specifically a pc user) in an e-mail how do you do it? In several experiements with just this scenario - any physically attached image files are either mangled by corporate firewalls or mangled because of Mail.app's non-standard MIME type usage. Yet sending a very simple 6 line or so HMTL msg with an img link to the image file on a server, works every time.

so does just sending the link in plain text email.

another anti-html email proponent here.

You guys do realize I am just playing devils advocate here right - if you read above you see that I rarely ever use html e-mail myself. Just wanted to be clear - so people don't think I am tryting to start some flame war.

Onto the matter at hand...

merv - your example of sending a link is true, but I equate it to receiving a snailmail postcard with no picture, but a note written on the back that says, "go to the post office to get the picture that was supposed to be on the front of this postcard"

So what is it that people absolutely hate about HTML mail. My perception is:

* People hate HTML email because it is bloated.
Yes - this is indeed true, but in this day of HS cable, DSL, T1 connections, etc - does that 5k overhead really matter. Are these same proponents of non-HTML e-mail also using Lynx (text only, console based) as their web browser?

* HTML e-mail can pose a security risk
This is also true - but as far as I know, is this not mostly related to MS products and PC's?

What else?

I agree - in the Microsoft world, HTML email is ridden with security risks, bugs, unwanted javascript functionality etc

But doesn't it seem a bit ridiculous that in this day and age we are unable to insert italics into our email? Or block quotes? The problems with HTML email have come about, I think, from poor implementations, and this has made a lot of purists (including, until recently, myself) think that the very concept of formatting email is sinful. I think we were wrong :-)

HOLY COW quentinsf... I couldn't have said it better myself! Thx for the input!

I think I want PDF based email.

privacy risk
 

That depends on whether you include privacy concerns in your definition of "security".

If an HTML mail message includes images then displaying that message involves interaction with the web server where those image files reside.
I.e. the moment you read the message, the sender knows you are reading it because he sees the requests sent to his web server to get the image files.

This is of course a great boon to a spammer because it confirms that your email address is valid.
And even for non-spam, the act of reading an HTML message (with images) gives the sender an opportunity to find out your IP address and to link up that IP address with your email address. Not a big deal in most cases, but perhaps not information that you would give out if you were asked directly for it.

I wouldn't use an email client that didn't allow me to disable retrieval of images in HTML messages. Both Mail.app and Entourage have this as an option (E.g.: "allow network access when displaying complex HTML")

I definitely agree that their is a privacy issue with html email, and I guess I am a little jaded as somehow in using email for well over 10+ years I have managed to stay off the spammers list (knock on wood). If I do get any spam I recognize it immediately and trash without opening it. So I have not suffered or even seen the privacy issue as far as html email goes. If I ever use html email its only to friends an associates who recognize its from me and then I only use it for purposes of styled text or html graphics. No funny stuff!

I seem to remember reading somewhere (thought it was on OSXHints but no luck searching), that you can get around the problem of images showing up as attachments on PC's by adding the images last, below your signature.

dD

darndog - that works about 50% or less of the time...

i guess i'll chime in here with a few thoughts about email, html email, ted kennedy and Chappaquiddick.

some things seem inconsequential, but they can be rife with consequences and impact.

i regard email as a terse form of communication with the added benefit of a journal/audit trail.

html is a page markup language which implies some knowledge of design skills (we've seen crappy websites).

one person's sense of design is another's atrocities.

email is a push technology. web site is a pull. when we visit an ugly website, it is blameless; we chose to go there. when we receive ugly email, we blame the sender.

i get fwd emails from my sister consisting of quoted/scrambled text and embeds five deep and every cc: emx address from all recipients in the history of the communique. the content amounts to some crappy lamentation or platitude or joke.

i never want to receive an html email from my sister. the fuzzy bears, butterflies and sappy midi music would result in a headline in the local press :D

there are ways to provide emphasis in text email. if it requires more, then email is, perhaps, the wrong medium.

the email protocol wasn't designed to be what it has evolved into. it suffers from featuritis, much like a windows app ;] yes, 5k overhead matters. and the potential for security flaws increases with the bags hung on the protocol.

the cost of provider's email servers has gone from tiny little boxen to enormous iron to handle the cruft. who do you think pays for the difference? consumers.

consider the consequences.

--
the medium is the message. -Marshall McLuhan

But I still think apple should include html emails, because they themselves use it.

I assume most of you received the "hell froze over" email from apple the other day... How else could they have done that email? the pics would have been in my attachments box and the ad in plain text at the bottom....

Since they themselves do it , they should allow the users too. I am not a spammer just a guy who wants to send an email with text and pics to friends and know they see them and not hope they figured out the attachments folder....

I need to email Steve Jobs about this (hehehe)...

Followup:


No html emailing using Panther version of Mail.
(bummer). I cannot believe they would exclude this even though they do it in their own emails!

I need to get over to Cupertino and have a sit down with the gang at apple and discuss this gray area. (hehe..)

One hundred percent with you on that. The inability to create formatted webmail using Mac web browsers is a joke. Text-only email is like pidgeon post. It's dead. It has developed beyond it's original concept and advocating the virtues of low bandwidth email messages is like advocating the virtues of black and white TV.

The bandwidth is readily available now for formatted email on a global scale. Squeezing as much crappy text-only messages into that bandwidth is simply to the financial advantage of the ISP, no-one else. As far as HTML security is concerned, most IT students could write mail apps that enable text formatting and picture inclusion, yet remove all other (including malicous) code at source.

Apple is supposed to be about style, not ASCII. If you want to send your friends plain-text emails, you might as well skip the .Mac account and use one of the many FREE email service providers. Many provide calendar, online bookmarks, task lists, journals, notes, imports from Palm handhelds, WAP access etc.

Of course, if you are really into retro-suffering, I have an email client app that works in DOS on a PC (a 286 will do) where you get really cool white text on a really cool black background. And I think I may still have a bulletin board cassette tape in the attic for my Tandy 1000... :-)

I don't think the bandwidth is available at all, most of the world is still on dialup and during the last worm outbreak e-mail was delayed on average by 4 hours, that's a stupidly long delay for something that is supposed to be fairly 'instant'.

With ever rising levels of spam clogging the networks adding html abilities to 'everyday' e-mail clients would just make things worse, e-mail should remain (for the most part) plaintext or rtf formatted until the network is liberated from all the spam and scams.

Asking for html e-mail is like looking at a truck in city traffic and saying 'all those cars should be trucks'.

* apologises for the outburst *

HTML belongs in email like shrimp salad belongs at a kosher luncheon.

I not only don't render HTML, I also subject email containing HTML tags to considerably heavier filtering. If your email even remotely resembles a sales pitch, known scam, or invitation to go see/do something, or contains headers or body that reference any of a couple hundred domains, product names, or buzzwords, it's going straight into the trash.

If you want people to read HTML-formatted stuff, put up a web page and send them a friggin' link.

Ditto.

Email should be text, use the web and email a link if you want to send HTML.

YEAH! YEAH!! Let's get to some crosses and matches too and get this show on the road!! YEAH!! YEAH!!!

I think AHunter3 comments are probably indicative of the larger populations feelings in general about HTML e-mail. Mainly because the spammers have ruined it for everyone using HTML e-mail in an unsafe manner. I personally am a designer and I see everything in shades, tones, lines, and forms. To me - HTML e-mail is a nice addition to my repertoire and a good way to send a polished correspondence to someone. Now that being said - I don't use it very often because most times it is discarded.

I feel though you shouldn't crucify a format solely on the merits of the way it has been used poorly in the past. I ask these people that are so against HTML e-mail - if they can do without their MS Word (or other Word Processor) and create documents solely in a plain text editor. I think not.

No - we (those who are against HTML email) think that you should use the right tool for the job. Email is (we think) for fast and efficient transfer of relatively short textual messages.

If you want to send a document (something long and formatted, something that usually takes a few seconds to render on my 600 MHz G3), then you should send it as an attachment. That way the receiver has the option to read it when he/she wants to spend the time.

With email, I want to be able to go click, skim, click, skim, at a rate of more than one message per second. Of course, part of the division here might be between those who receive only a few messages a day, and those (like me) who receive hundreds.

Yes, I do. I create my documents in bbedit and use LaTeX to format them. I never have to worry about the files format becoming obsolete, it is just text, I can work on it on any platform, and format it on almost any platform, and produce output in almost any format I want.

I will use word (or whatever) at work, if I *have* to, but I usually put up a fight first.

Nice to see this thread come back to life....

Hopefully the emailer in Tiger will allow those of us who want to use html the ability to do so.

When I send pics in emails I use Mozilla.