Let's
face it: Some
people just don't know how to
live in
society. Have you ever received one of those
emails that gave you
lots of
trouble to
download and/or
decode? That's what I call
mail horror. Some of the most
common forms of this
internet disease are:
- HUGE emails: Somebody (usually a friend) decides that the AVI version of Gone with the Wind is way too cool to keep for himself. You find yourself trying to download a 100Mb email using your phone line. Argh!
- Microsoft Powerpoint: Why send JPGs and GIFs that can be read by the entire universe then you can send a gigantic Powerpoint file? For some unknown reason, lots of people assume you have Powerpoint installed.
- Sending the message as a Microsoft Word Document: That's horribly annoying! Some people don't use the body of the message at all. They just edit their texts using Microsoft Word and attach the damn file to the email! And, of course, again they assume you have Microsoft Word installed, and that you're using the same version as theirs! Oh boy...
- Bad Quoting: Remember the old days when everybody knew how to quote a message? In those days, one would put a character, usually ">" to the left of each line, indicating it was a quote. All useless parts of the original message were supressed (like the sender's signature, greetings, etc). Today, it's fashionable to put the entire original message in the body again! Or, even worse: The entire thread of messages! You end up with a message around 400k that contains all of the previous replies! Yuck!!!
- The blind forwarding syndrome: Most people get jokes and they immediately decide to forward it to somebody they know. That is fine, but when they forward, their programs normally quote the entire message. Of course, the receiving party also has friends, and he forwards again (and his program quotes the entire mail again). At the end of this forwarding frenzy, you receive a totally garbled and misformatted text. Some get so bad they're even hard to read.
- The multiple Cc:: The same guys who send the jokes normally send them to a zillion different people, and you can see the email addresses of each one of those on the Cc: field... Of course, they can see your email address too! Sometimes, someone will get offended and reply to all. Well... Prepare yourself to see a flame war being delivered multiple times a day to your mailbox.
- Emails with colors: Yes! believe it or not, some people do use colors to "improve" their emails. Some even use it to mark areas that require further action from your part. And if you don't have an RTF capable mailer... All you get is plain old black and white. (You can always send an email back saying that you're color blind. It's a delicate way of making people stop doing this). :)