Tony, Like many angry respondents to Madscientist's post, you appear have little experience as a sysadmin for a non-IT vertical (as differentiated from an ISP/ASP or hardware/software vendor sysadmin, as well from the technical executive level). I could be wrong about this, but your tone seems to suggest that you haven't had direct user support responsibility, or perhaps you've blocked out the memory. :)
Madscientist is no newbie. S/he is quite aware of the errors in judgment made by non-technical users. Yet even when these errors impact cost (through bandwidth usage), privacy, or security, if the non-techie is either in charge or generally unsupervised, they dictate the "need" that you (and I, and I'm sure _M as well) ridicule. Perceived corporate "needs" only exist in context, just like SOPs, salary grades, and filing methods. But if you're a disempowered in-house sysadmin or a hungry consultant, unless you're a master at hypnotizing brain-addled career executives, you're going to have to bend from the hard-and-fast when it means keeping your job, and you inevitably allow "need" rhetoric to creep into your own appraisals. You'll note that I send in text/plain exclusively. But do all my clients? No way. The technical firms are easy to sway, sure, but there I've usually got a rational higher-up or founder who's willing to even page or sit through a description of the problems. A new business who defers all technical matters to our firm, or an old business pinching the pennies, can also be easy to mold. But the others--some are small businesses, some are huge--often ignore spoken or written warnings. Sometimes, a few attentive secretaries will listen, which is always satisfying...while their bosses continue with their wasteful too-busy act! In most cases, I simply indemnify us in writing from any ensuing unhappy incidents, and forge on, grudgingly noting the local "need." There are numerous clients we've dumped over such things over the years, too; it's case-by-case. Your allegation that only "marketroids" fuel the "need" is short-sighted. I think that much more damage has been done through ignorance or inattention than through any visible *insistence* on rich text. For most, "need" is just a synonym for "precedent," and Netscape, Mozilla, Outlook, OE, and AOL all keep that going strong. In other cases, understaffed IT departments, undertrained employees, and lazy executives all keep the "need" around. Your attack on Madscientist's rhetoric alone as a seminal problem is thus unwarranted; I would venture to say that the client he mentioned (the one that uses HTML mail by decree for charting information or some such), *may* be more easily made aware of the pitfalls of rich text, at least for other functions, than a company that simply uses HTML because they're allowed to...just as your employer, a marketing company, surely knows the supposed "acceptance" figures for HTML and plain text better than anyone else. Not that that's helping matters yet, but it may be a better start than outright denial. > If it can't be said in plain text, it isn't worth saying. You'd better have a word with your webmasters about that, then. :) And I can't resist this: the first Italic font was designed only 50 years after the Gutenberg Bible...there's an entrenched technology for you! -Sandy Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Please visit the Knowledge Base for answers to frequently asked questions: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
