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.