The Evils of HTML email
This morning as I walked in the door, hot cider in hand, I was greeted with a big ol' angerball of a problem. See, one of our users couldn't login. Looking at her account, it appears that her Mailbox had been deleted. Uh oh. That's never good. So, a somewhat urgent call was made to FirstClass, purveyors of semi-fine if somewhat quirky email software, and much hackery was engaged in. Now, once we got the account breathing again, it was clear that the contents had not survived the experience, and thusly, restoration from backup was required.
No big deal, right?
Well, our PO is close to 40GB. So, restoring that took over an hour, and then we had to get the backup server engaged and data transplanted. Another hour, still. Now for the fun part. See, FirstClass does have redeeming features, including my favorite: the Batch Admin scripting language. Essentially, there are scripts whereby you can do things like extract the contents of one user's account in a preserved fashion. Not to mention to do other things like mass-creation of users, summoning of specific user data, etc. It's handy. Today, it was crucial. We gathered together all of the user's email, attachment documents and appropriate transfer script in a single script.
It's a nice feature. Except when it comes to HTML Email. It treats all these pretty little bundles of text that include those lovely lavender text stylings and that email background that you just HAD to include as singular files it calls Attach0.html. Our user had over 150 emails, about 35 of them were sent by all you punks who love your stylings and demand that they be passed on. Each of these Attach0.html files had to be loving downloaded, renamed and quarantined, reuploaded. Oy. Is plain text too good for you? That's what I don't understand. This may be my web space, and it may look a certain way, but you can still get the same thing through my RSS feed. In fact, I almost recommend that you DO get it through my RSS feed. But, really, I just want people to place the emphasis on the text that they write, not what font it's in, not what color the background is, not what the italics looks like.
People, just use plain text, it makes your IT guy's life a lot easier.
Comments:
To hell with IT guys. It makes MY life a lot easier. :-)
ƒ^¢& HTML mail.
Posted by Lee Bennett on November 14, 2005 — 7:59 PM
You realize that you're basically telling people not to poop because it makes life easier for the guy who cleans their septic tanks, right?
Look, here's the bottom line: I do not give a shit what the internal data format encoding of my outgoing e-mail is. It could be ASCII, it could be UTF-8, it could be HTML, it could be smoke signals for all I care. What I expect is that what I type HERE shows up THERE. And if what I type HERE happens to include italics or boldface (or dashes or ellipses), I expect that they will appear THERE just the way I intended.
If they don't, the e-mail system is broken.
If it's hard for you to make e-mail work properly with the tools you have, don't complain to the consumers of your services. Complain to the people who make the tools.
Posted by Jeff Harrell on November 14, 2005 — 9:09 PM
Generally, Jeff, I'd agree with you. But when your email proclivities make my job Much Harder than it should be, forgive me if I get a bit upset. Generally, my job is to make sure that mail flows, and 99.7% of the time, it indeed DOES flow. However, when shit happens, it's nice to know that email is just a bunch of text, not attached HTML crap.
Posted by Tom Bridge on November 14, 2005 — 9:56 PM
Seriously and for real, I'm sorry you had a crappy day. But if your job is much harder than it should be, blame the toolsmiths who created tools that can't do the job without making your life hard.
Styled e-mail is not going away, nor should it. Suggesting that it should is like arguing that we should just forget four-color process and go back to movable type because it makes the pressman's job so much easier.
Posted by Jeff Harrell on November 14, 2005 — 11:14 PM