MJ Ray wrote:
I'd love stopping the idiots who specify things like white background with no specified text colour, so it goes wrong unless everyone has a default text colour similar to theirs.
It also tends to go horribly horribly wrong when quoted.
If they aren't competent to design rich emails, they should stick to plain text ones rather than causing everyone pain.
I do use richtext a lot (when I know the recipient can cope with it) - stuff like bullet points can help to make an email clearer. Shame that most email clients make bullets hard work.
[...] (although most people prefer a text quote to a PDF attachment, in my experience).
IME, most people prefer sufficient content in the email text to avoid having to open the attachment for the important points, but want the content in a form they can easily print (which for most clients means an attachment - otherwise you are forced to print email details like From/Subject/etc).
Personally, I always send quotes as PDFs. It's pretty much what PDFs were designed for - I know how it'll look when they get it, its designed for printing, and (without some messing around) they can't edit it.
Stuff like mass-mailing Word documents, letterhead graphics and video clips must stop, or per-byte mailserver charges will become reality sooner than we'd like.
I'm not convinced that (on average) capacity isn't keeping pace with usage. The problem occurs for non-average (when you're stuck on dial-up, for example).
If mail clients just told the user what they were doing and helped them get it right that would go a long way. The most popular ones do not make the difference between mailing a 5k attachment and a 5M attachment apparant. When sending a photo, would it be that hard to offer a resize/convert to jpeg option?
The idea of forwarding "funny" images is not going to go away.
ObOrigTopic: it seems like it would be far cheaper to switch on detection of repeat attachments and reject them at SMTP time with an appropriate "no bulk attachments" message.
I'm not sure the attachments (at a binary level) are repeats. I haven't checked, but even if they are all the same then this would very quickly be changed (making a one or two pixel change on sending would be pretty simple and would change the characteristics of the attachment sufficiently). It would be necessary to allow my web designer to email me a few iterations of a logo, for example, without having it blocked.
OCR-ing take the step of making qualitative decisions, not just quantitative ones.
I like the idea of ocr'ing one-off attachments, for accessibility and searching, but that may be best done in the mail client.
I think office server is the place, not mail client (but also not ISP mail server). Ie the same place spamassasin sits. But if Thunderbird had an extension to do this I'd use it!
Of-course the email client has the code to render the email, so that may be the easiest place. On the other hand, the joy of FOSS is that you can take code from one place and put it somewhere else....
I did look for libraries for converting an email to an image, but without success (although I didn't try that hard).