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The Dying Art of Plain Text Email
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Once upon a time, email was nothing more than plain text that
came to you on a blank screen in a font that could be read by just
about anyone. Now two new forms of email have appeared. The first
is mildly annoying; the second is wildly impractical for Macs
running Unix shell-based Lynx accounts and dialup modems.
The mildly annoying email is nothing more than a text message
with some .html added to it. Yahoo.com and MSN are notorious for
transmitting email in this contaminated form. The receiving
computer will declare the incoming message as unreadable and
suggest that it be downloaded to the Mac's hard drive for further
processing.
This HTML "page" can be opened as a text file. What one gets is
something that looks like the following:
<html><div
style='background-color:'><DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>Dear Manuel,</DIV>
<DIV> I found your name as a
volunteer and wonder if you might be able to help me. I
would be forever thankful!</DIV>
<DIV> here is my problem: although my
computer is old, I am a neophite and I was trying different things
with my computer. I must have pushed the wrong button at some point
because now, everytime I open a file and make some changes to it,
when I come to save it, it will not save it under the same
name. The message Save As automatically come up although
I just want to save. Any clues?</DIV>
<DIV> I hail from Canada and we
are having a wonderful day here. How about
you?</DIV>
<DIV> Thank you -
Danielle</DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></div><br
clear=all><hr>Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger:
<a href='http://g.msn.com/1HM1ENCA/c144??PS=47575'>Click
Here</a><br></html>
Most of the characters are meaningless HTML code. Only a
fraction of the transmission is sensible text. A laborious cut and
paste "cleaning" produces the final product:
Dear Manuel,
I found your name as a volunteer and wonder if you might be able
to help me I would be forever thankful! here is my problem:
although my computer is old, I am a neophite and I was trying
different things with my computer. I must have pushed the wrong
button at some point because now, everytime I open a file and make
some The message Save As automatically come up although I just want
to save. Any clues? I hail from Canada and we are having a
wonderful day here. How about you?
In terms of the impractical messages that a low-end Mac can
receive, these messages usually have four parts to them. The
message will have an HTML file with the message, a .gif image, a
.wav sound file, and either a second .gif or .wav file to
close.
Since when does simple email require a web browser with all the
plug-ins? For basic Triassic Macs - whose users still number in the
millions - email is now becoming a decoding chore.
The size of these four-part email message are also a problem. In
some cases, the four files together bloat the email message from
4-5 KB to 100 KB or more. A group of messages this size can quickly
fill an electronic mailbox to capacity.
If the four-part email messages are not bad enough, there is
also "harpie" of bad email: the Word document. Some of these
documents are larger than 200 KB and carry messages that could be
condensed to a mere 10 KB in plain text. I, along with other
Triassic Mac users, usually delete
these on the spot because they take up too may server space - and
they usually cannot be opened without a modern Mac.
The computer industry needs to be mindful of one economic fact.
Most of the world lives on an income of $500 a year or less. Older
computers have slowly migrated to other parts of the world and are
now connecting these regions to the Internet. If there is to be a
true global village, communication standards have to be maintained.
Creating vanity email messages that can only be read by well heeled
American computer users is not the way to do this.
Even in the United States, old Triassic Macs and other systems
still abound. This is one reason why there is such a demand for
sites such as Low End Mac.
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