Re: Hey HTML e-mailers!

David Greiner seems to want HTML to be rendered in the same way 
everywhere, right?

As it happens, I spent today working on HTML e-mail. What I worked on 
what finding and displaying an excerpt of a message, to help the user 
decide what the message is about and whether it needs to be opened at 
all. Other issues I've worked on recently include preventing a 
malevolent email message from mimicking the program's own user 
interface, identifying text to quote when responding, and adding the 
text of a message to a full-text index (these latter two are closely 
related, of course).

None of these four issues seem to be even remotely like what David 
Greiner (and you?) care about. I suspect there's a lesson to be learned 
here.

I venture to suggest that mail users aren't asking for their mail 
handling programs to display HTML email perfectly, they're asking for 
features to spend less time reading mail, for more protection against 
spammers, phishers and other unpleasant individuals, for good reply 
functions and for good searching. If that suggestion is close to the 
truth, it follows naturally that an "html in email" standard must focus 
on aiding these things.

(FWIW, I don't think these four items are a complete list, or even the 
top four items. It's just what was in my head tonight. I feel 
reasonably sure that I've mentioned four of the top ten concerns of 
most MUA/indexing/webmail/archiving implementers.)

Arnt

Received on Friday, 7 September 2007 20:33:18 UTC