User Interface and Electronic Mail

[dmaze]

Our new corporate masters use a well-known largely Windows-oriented mail system (thankfully not Exchange, and the client does run inder Linux). One consequence of this is that the email editor looks similar to Word or your favorite other font-aware GUI text editor. And a side consequence of this is that I'm actually happier to get HTML email...and it's hard to send good-looking text mail.

So I now understand the temptation of HTML mail: if everyone you correspond with lives in an HTML-aware mail world, then everyone's life is slightly prettier if everyone uses HTML. But I come from a world where not everyone does, so now there's the challenge (which the software doesn't help with at all) of making my GUIfied mail look good to text mail readers. I hope I'm succeeding, but this is a hard UI problem.

I think there are just too many options. Some people send their email in blue. Why blue? I'm not sure. The formatting options I want most are "monospace" and "italic", and sometimes "list", if I want more than that I'll write a document in something else and attach it. These options would be pretty easy to port over to your slightly-formatted-to-text renderer. So then you're not foisting angry fruit salad on the world, and you've made both the HTML-reader and text-reader people happy. Just as soon as I get to hacking on this closed-source heavily-legacy mail software...

Comments

[nonnihil.livejournal.com]

The greatest favor any mail software can do is to make proper use of the MIME MULTIPART/alternative node. This is why I love Thunderbird for my work email -- it properly both generates and reads MULTIPART/alternative, nearly always creating readable text for the TEXT/plain part and still getting the formatting right in the TEXT/html part.

(Having spent too much time at a previous job parsing bad MIME, I'm a stickler about good MIME. Thunderbird usually does good MIME.)

Better still would be a Thunderbird extension that could read and generate

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<a href"http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

The greatest favor any mail software can do is to make proper use of the MIME MULTIPART/alternative node. This is why I love Thunderbird for my work email -- it properly both generates and reads MULTIPART/alternative, nearly always creating readable text for the TEXT/plain part and still getting the formatting right in the TEXT/html part.

(Having spent too much time at a previous job parsing bad MIME, I'm a stickler about good MIME. Thunderbird usually does good MIME.)

Better still would be a Thunderbird extension that could read and generate <a href"http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">markdown</a>...

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't go so far as "everyone's life is slightly prettier". Certainly I get a lot of ghastly-looking mail through my text-format, when it's all links I can't follow and bold and underline and half the time I delete it. But I get much more offensive email at work, using my HTML reader, with changes of font for no good reason, and eight different colors which convey no logical content and half the time don't have any contrast. HTML email allows people to indulge their worst inclinations to be "creative" without any kind of requirement that form matches function.

blue in so many ways

[arcanology.livejournal.com]

Oh right, new corporate masters. How is that anyway? Do you have a corporate tattoo yet?

The blue thing happens in general because exchange likes to put replies in blue (presumably in some misbegotten attempt to set them off from the original text). The terrible thing is that all of them are in blue, so the first reply is blue, setting it off, and later replies to that from exchange users tend to stay blue.

I generally just beat my email into "compose only plain text" and coerce html email I get into text email in the reply, just as punishment to html users.