EMAIL FORMATTING: Important information for members of email lists!!
An ever increasing number of people are using email client software, which
for one technical reason or another, formats text in its own special way.
The kind of software I'm referring to, particularly Netscape and
Microsoft's email clients, allow you to see and write "rich-text"
features, such as bold and italics, changes in font size, etc.
That may be fine for you locally, but for a mailing list, or
any other email distribution system, which is based on the lowest common
denominator of ASCII text, all of your "rich-text" and "HTML-based"
formatting features are at best lost, or at worst, make your message
unreadable. Members of email lists should learn how to turn these
"features" on or off depending on whom you're addressing. If you're
sending a message to a mailing list, turn it off. All you want to send
here is plain ASCII text. Don't do anything fancy....and especially, DON'T
send attachments. In other words, you want it to look just like this
paragraph - simple, plain, ordinary text with nothing in bold, nothing
italicized, nothing in different fonts.
Microsoft and Lotus Notes email software, I've noticed, often send cute little
mini-attachments with company logos or some little graphic that winds up
getting clobbered in the listserv's filter. I'm sure it looks great at
your place, but when it shows up on my email, it looks meaningless and is
annoying. You need to realize that these things only look good if the
person recieving the mail has the software to interpret them. If not, what
is seen looks something like:
---example one---
This is a message I am sending. I
should have used plaintext. oops.
sincerely
email user
---end example one---
or worse, the recipient may recieve email which gets displayed like this:
---example two---
Parts/attachments:
1 Shown 51 lines Text
2 60 lines Text
----------------------------------------
Hi, please read the attached mail.
[Part 2, Text/HTML 60 lines]
[Cannot display this part. Press "V" then "S" to save in a file]
------end example two----
Obviously, when this happens, you haven't managed to get your message to
the recipient.
I realize many, if not most, people have no choice in what type of email
software they use, but I will put in yet another plug for my favorite (and
free) email software which runs on the end user's computer, Pegasus Mail
(see http://www.pegasus.usa.com/), and a close second, Eudora
(http://www.eudora.com/). These two do email over SLIP/PPP type setups
far better than any other packages I've ever seen. Using either of these
practically precludes you from making some of the horrendous formatting
mistakes I've seen over the years. Please remember - the whole concept of
the Internet is to facilitate communication between multiple platforms. If
the person sitting at home with a 2400 baud modem and a dumb terminal,
logged into an old unix box, can't read your email, then you have
overformatted it. Since that person is frequently me, I obviously have a
vested interest in this! :). And for those who still are not convinced -
be advised that blind Internet users use text-to-speech processing
software to read email. For example, this line:
This is a message I am sending. I
should have used plaintext. oops.
taken from example one, above, would sound like:
left angle bracket dee eye vee right angle bracket left angle bracket font
color equal sign hash zero zero zero zero zero zero size equal sign two
right angle bracket this is a message I am sending period ampersand en be
ess pee semicolon I should have used plaintext period ampersand en be es
pee semicolon oops period left angle bracket forward slash font right
angle bracket left angle bracket forward slash div right angle bracket.
You can imagine, this is a huge waste of time, and is hard to listen to!
In any event, at least please try to learn the features of your own
software if you can't switch over. There are probably people in your
own office, university, or neighborhood who can help you to learn!! Think
lowest common denominator.....do not assume others can read what you
write......Avoid using rich-text features or HTML based email with the
mailing list if at all possible. Thank you.