But what about mail that isn’t junk … but that has some formatting and design?
I don’t think that design makes something junk. 
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Postal mail that is sent to me by someone I know can certainly be as
designed as the sender can manage. But if it’s e-mail, I have all my
spam filters set to KILL, and that usually means that heavily designed
mail doesn’t get answered at the same sub-minute response time as the
plain-text variety, because one of the many things my Bayesian filter
has learned by brutal experience is that HTML == strong likelihood of
spam. I try to keep the spam box unread messages in the low hundreds,
but I only go through it once or twice a day, less frequently
sometimes. It’s a matter of guilt by association, nothing more.
Walter
On Jun 1, 2009, at 9:38 AM, grantsymon wrote:
But what about mail that isn’t junk … but that has some formatting
and design?I don’t think that design makes something junk.
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“low hundreds”. I see the problem. I must be doing something right, because I have a tiny tiny amount of junk, compared with that.
But purely as a point of discussion, how do you see this evolving over time? From where I stand, it seems clear that email will become more content rich. I get an increasing number of newsletters etc. from clients and I have several colleagues that are sending out similar comms. It would be a shame if that didn’t evolve and improve. Sending an email containing a link to a web page/blog is pretty uninspiring.
The problem of rich email used to be one of bandwidth, but this is no longer an issue. Even on a mobile phone. What do you think of pdf or jpg emails compared to html? Do they represent the same problem?
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On Jun 1, 2009, at 10:15 AM, grantsymon wrote:
“low hundreds”. I see the problem. I must be doing something
right, because I have a tiny tiny amount of junk, compared with that.
I’ve had my current e-mail address since 1994, so that does tend to
attract a long tail of people who know it. And quite a few machines
that know it, too.
But purely as a point of discussion, how do you see this evolving
over time? From where I stand, it seems clear that email will
become more content rich. I get an increasing number of newsletters
etc. from clients and I have several colleagues that are sending out
similar comms. It would be a shame if that didn’t evolve and
improve. Sending an email containing a link to a web page/blog is
pretty uninspiring.
It all depends on what you expect e-mail to be. My own corner of that
elephant was formed in the days when the Web was something fun to look
at between FTP and Gopher sessions. And while my first modem didn’t
have acoustic couplers for the phone handset, it might as well have
done. (We had one of those in the computer science lab at my first
college.)
E-mail is defined as a plain-text 7-bit message format. This is
codified in the RFC’s (rules of the road for the Internet). It was
intended by its creators for sending words between people quickly and
without regard for synchronicity. (The entire structure of how mail is
sent by forwarding between servers is part of that design model.)
There is a second format called MIME (Multipart Internet Mail
Extensions) that came later, and is often misunderstood to be a part
of e-mail, since it was designed to piggy-back over the e-mail
protocols and provide a way to send attachments and messages with more
than one format (HTML + Text is one example of this) mixed together.
The sender is supposed to provide the same message in multiple formats
whenever they use that protocol to encode the body of a message. It’s
been my experience that people who understand how this is supposed to
work are dwindling in number. An e-mail ought to contain the same
content (but different style) if you choose to set your mail reader to
ignore all HTML (as I do). This is extra work for the sender, but like
making a Web page that can be understood by screen readers, it’s work
that you are supposed to do, because what you’re trying to do is
communicate. Apple Mail will always send a plain-text “part” along
with the “Puppies and Kittens HTML Template”-formatted HTML part,
because it’s a good “netizen”. That text part will contain the words
that you typed, which presumably are what you meant to say.
The problem of rich email used to be one of bandwidth, but this is
no longer an issue. Even on a mobile phone. What do you think of
pdf or jpg emails compared to html? Do they represent the same
problem?
If you were to send me a personal e-mail that contained nothing but
attachments in the body, maybe contact sheets from a recent shoot that
I hired you to do, that would be one thing. But if you were doing this
with commercial (unsolicited or list-subscribed) e-mail, it would be
incredibly wasteful, because the same message and attachment would be
sitting on hundreds or thousands of servers all around the world,
waiting for people to read or ignore it. A link, on the other hand,
goes to one copy of that resource, on one server. Yes, your bandwidth
and storage are cheap. But you don’t want to presume that everyone
else’s storage and bandwidth are yours to use as you like.
Spam is a huge global problem, growing every day, and the solutions
that have presented themselves so far haven’t been anything but a
momentary speed-bump in its exponential growth. Like CAPTCHA, telling
the difference between one man’s spam and another man’s filet mignon
is pretty hard for machines to manage on their own. Making your well-
intended commercial mail look more like spam than not seems to me to
be self-defeating, because in order to communicate with someone else,
first the message has to get there.
Walter
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