This is a collection of thoughts and statements about things that annoy me. I am a big, angry man. Hear me roar, or piss off and give me peace.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

E-mail abominations!

So, I have been getting a lot of email recently.

More and more email (real email - ham, not spam) is coming through in HTML format - HyperText Markup Language - the format of web pages... The clue is in the http:// - That's HyperText Transfer Protocol.

Email is sent using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). The clue is in the name! Nowhere in there does it mention HyperText.

Keep your filthy HTML to your web pages.

There's more to the internet than just the www!

Being a purist (luddite) I use a plain text email client called pine. It's great... I can log in to my email server from a far away place using ssh (secure shell) and get my email quickly even over a low bandwidth or high latency connection. it's not pretty, but it works.

STOP PRESS!

I was thinking about the subject of this post since I was engaging in a Flame War on a mailing list... And then... I receive an email invite to a wine tasting... A subject line and a 6.8MB JPEG attachment! WTF? How completely useless is that? And 6.8MB? What were they thinking - even in these modern times an email with no body text and a 6.8MB attachment?

(Deleted).