Re: HTML email (WAS: Re: [opensuse] KMail - First Impressions)
From: "Kai Ponte"
Unfortunately, we're not living in the days of Pine anymore. HTML email is here to stay.
Keep in mind, most people don't give a rip about what format they're sending nor do they care about size or formatting or whatever.
Alienating the 99% of people who wish to send email - html or otherwise - is a bad choice.
As I said, I tried to reject HTML emails for awhile at work and got shot down. Even trying to enforce a bottom posting format was futile.
I blame training. The mega-corp I work for uses microsoft LookOut and exchange swerver. Everyone top-replies, and I appear to be the only person in the whole organisation who knows that you can scroll down and read the earlier messages. It baffles my boss completely. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the organisation and the amount of training on Email, word processing, or even the use of file servers to store things instead of drie C is absolutely zero.
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On Monday 17 November 2008 09:05:59 am you wrote:
As I said, I tried to reject HTML emails for awhile at work and got shot down. Even trying to enforce a bottom posting format was futile.
I blame training. The mega-corp I work for uses microsoft LookOut and exchange swerver. Everyone top-replies, and I appear to be the only person in the whole organisation who knows that you can scroll down and read the earlier messages. It baffles my boss completely.
Yes, however, you gotta remember - they don't CARE about formatting. Unless you're the CEO/President then you're fighting losing war, and probably pissing off people to boot. Also, many - if not most - people use the email system as their file cabinet and file storage. We have staff who have 2GB inboxes. (Our "limit" is 1GB, but that can be overridden.) My manager has - last I checked - 54,000 emails in his inbox. As I follow the Getting Things Done philosophy, I have currently... ...two emails in my inbox. The rest are sorted into online or offline folders appropriately. (I get about 400 emails a day and can't manage otherwise.) See attached and: http://www.perfectreign.com/stuff/2008/20081117_outlook.png I figure it is better to win people over with some accomidation. If they want to top post, I can gently remind people not to. However, it does actually work well in email in that I can easily scan what the message is and then review previous messages if I need to. I keep reminding people that I use openSUSE on my laptop and a few of my desktops at work. I won't go so far as to recommend drive letters, though. -- kai www.filesite.org || www.perfectreign.com Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it. - Dee Hock
On Monday 17 November 2008 09:05:59 Robert E A Harvey wrote:
I blame training. The mega-corp I work for uses microsoft LookOut and exchange swerver. Everyone top-replies, and I appear to be the only person in the whole organisation who knows that you can scroll down and read the earlier messages. It baffles my boss completely.
Its the same where I work. But I don't consider top-posting to be evil in a corporate environment. Here, in a mailing list, I have access to every message that's posted. If you've written it, I've already seen it. At work, I'm often included as a To: or a Cc: the eighth or tenth time a message goes around, and it's finally determined that I need to be involved. In a corporate environment, there's no mailing list. No archives to retrieve an old message thread from. When I'm finally asked to solve that problem, I need my first email to include enough background that I can understand the problem. So I'm very pleased that Outlook defaults to top-posting, HTML formatting, and it encourages every message to include the whole previous thread. It's not what I want for mailing lists, but then, I'm not dumb enough to use my corporate email account for personal mailing lists. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
participants (3)
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Jerry Houston -
Kai Ponte -
Robert E A Harvey