[hunkhuang]

Hey guys, i heard that new Panther Mail has a feature that Apple Mail can send an html mail easily by just drag and drop.

But i'm using Jaguar right now. Do i have the same feature sending html via my Appple Mail ??

[cpac]

you'll need to be more specific.

Jaguar Mail.app will send hyperlinks, which you can drag and drop from wherever, but it will not allow you to send out more complex HTML mail.

I haven't seen that Pather's Mail.app has more functionality in this respect, so if you have, please post some screen shots, or a link...

[hunkhuang]

Straight forward, what i mean html mail is kinda like NEWSLETTER.

I dont have the sample or screen shot BUT i watched Steve Jobs did a demo on Mail.app during WWDC.

He draged a website into Mail and opss, you can see a webpage in your mail and send to your friends...
which is mean : NEWSLETTER.

if you want to see, you can go here.
WWDC 2003

[JB72]

Originally posted by hunkhuang:
Hey guys, i heard that new Panther Mail has a feature that Apple Mail can send an html mail easily by just drag and drop.

That would be very cool.

[kennedy]

Originally posted by hunkhuang:
Hey guys, i heard that new Panther Mail has a feature that Apple Mail can send an html mail easily by just drag and drop.

But i'm using Jaguar right now. Do i have the same feature sending html via my Appple Mail ??

This is a Mac... just try it... right now... yes, I mean you...

Right now, go up and do File... Save As... select Desktop and give it a name like "example".

Then go into Mail, put yourself as the To address, then drag "example" off your desktop and into the body of the message. You'll see an attachment.

Hit send. Wait a bit. Hit Get Mail. Repeat until the mail shows up. It won't be exactly what you might expect... but it will prove HTML shows up in your email message!

Enjoy.

[cpac]

Originally posted by hunkhuang:
Straight forward, what i mean html mail is kinda like NEWSLETTER.

I dont have the sample or screen shot BUT i watched Steve Jobs did a demo on Mail.app during WWDC.

He draged a website into Mail and opss, you can see a webpage in your mail and send to your friends...
which is mean : NEWSLETTER.

if you want to see, you can go here.
WWDC 2003

There's very little reason for this:

either send a .pdf (which you can make from any OS X application via the print-save as .pdf options)

If it is a website, just send the link, and people will follow it.

In my experience HTML mail is used pretty much only for spamming.

[kennedy]

Originally posted by cpac:
There's very little reason for this:

either send a .pdf (which you can make from any OS X application via the print-save as .pdf options)

If it is a website, just send the link, and people will follow it.

In my experience HTML mail is used pretty much only for spamming.

I disagree completely. I receive many very nice, readable newsletters in HTML format. It is the best format currently for presentable email.

The beauty of HTML over PDF is that far more mail clients support HTML natively, such that the pretty newsletter appears directly in the preview window. Opening an attachment is cumbersome. Further, embedding links to take you to more information (if you are interested) is far superior in HTML.

Sending a link is indeed an option. It presents the trade-off of being a bit more cumbersome than having it show up in your preview vs. not wasting the bandwidth and disk space to send me a fat email. But this presents us with a spectrum of options...

1) You could send a simple link... no intro... no explanation... just a title ("August Issue of XXX")... everyone must follow the link to even see if there's anything that interests them.

2) You could send a minimal description of what they'll find at the link ("We have articles this month on XX, YY, ZZ, and AA."). Then maybe they can better judge whether anything will interest them before they go there.

3) You could send a full table of contents with the link. Then they probably know, "hey, I want to read about YY and about AA". They click the link to go to the table of contents, then click on YY or AA.

4) You could improve the user experience of #3 by instead of giving them one link, making each entry in the table of contents a link to the relevant article. Saves a useless step.

5) To make it more enjoyable for the reader, you can make the table of contents with links pretty... include some tiny pictures where appropriate... send a nice HTML table of contents. The bulk of the content remains on the server and accessed in the browser.

Lots of people have chosen #5 as the best way to deliver newsletters. For example, NY Times sends out great daily newspaper... I enjoy scanning the headlines with brief blurbs and sometimes photos... and if I want to read more, I just click on it. Very often, the headlines/blurbs are plenty for me. And the format allows them to drop an ad on the right side of that HTML table of contents, paying for the nice service they are providing me.

I also receive a couple HTML newsletters on automotive topics. Similar comments.

More relevant to this form, I get an HTML email from versiontracker.com. That is much more readable in HTML than text... and then its really nice to be able to click on a new software title and go directly to its description page.

HTML mail is good.

[JLL]

http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/evilmail.html

[kennedy]

Originally posted by JLL:
http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/evilmail.html
If you take away only one thing from this page, let it be this: When you send HTML email, you have no guarantee that your message will be A) readable at all or B) visually legible to the recipient. With plain text email, you always have that guarantee, no matter what mail client the recipient is using.

You need to move out of the 80's. If I am sending email to unknown targets, then I use plain text. But the vast majority of people that I communicate with have HTML capable mail clients. That wasn't true 5 years ago... but the computer world changes a lot in 5 years.

What this document fails to recognize is that we build HTML web pages and nicely formatted Word documents and PowerPoints because they are far more effective at communicating than plain text. Yes, as old-timers, we know to interpret *bold* when we see asterisks and so on... but just bolding is far more effective even for us, and even more so for the masses that now participate online.

Email is NOT just about simple messaging as the doc asserts. Maybe it was in the 80's... and SMS on cell phones is now... but email in the late 90's became a fundamental form of collaboration. More important than web pages and email... and arguably more important than the telephone. And what enabled that was the ability of email to carry attachments... serious content... and to do so with speed.

Life was hell for a while when people we're sending Word docs back and forth, just so they could bold a word in the paragraph... extra step just to read the darn message... and the incompatibility problems were tenfold what HTML causes. HTML solved that... nobody tries sending me stupid one-paragraph Word docs anymore. And the HTML shows up right in my preview pane... no extra step.

HTML is good. At least post 1998 it is.
Learn to love it.

[C.J. Moof]

No, it's not good, and I'll continue to hate it.

Why?

Because to render that bloated message, with it's fonts and images, my mail client turned web browser has to go out to a web server and grab those images.

Among other things, a HTTP transaction can disclose my OS, User Agent, and IP address. I have no interest in revealing that information to everybody that chooses to send me an email address.

The most nefarious use of this technology is web bugs. Web bugs are typically 1pixel images included in an HTML email, stored in a url specific to each message sent. When that image is requested by the mail reader, the hosting web server now has a verification that the email address is valid, read by an HTML rendering mail client at this IP address, at this time, and whatever other data is sent by that client.

This isn't acceptable to me. This is why I turn off image rendering in mail.app- I refuse to let it load images that I can't control. (I sure wish Apple would make it easier to override that on demand- I would let the New Music Tuesdays messages render- I choose to trust Apple, and a few other sources.)

I really don't miss the messages with no text, just a picture of generic viagra, a happy person with his new mortgage, or the hot Russian teens.

ASCII loving luddite,
C.J. Moof.