Wednesday, July 19th, 2006, 5:01 am
Outlook Discourages E-mail Correspondence
Filed under:
Upgrade to Thunderbird. It’s Open Source and it honours standards/netiquette.
ICROSOFT Outlook is a terrible mail application, despite some common beliefs (and expectations due to cost, or bloat). I cannot comment on its abilities as a calendaring software as I have only seen others using these peripherals features. However, at least one Outlook user whom I exchange E-mails with is breaking every rule in the book regularly (if not always). Outlook does not prevent him from doing this. As a matter of fact, it encourages this and a dissatisfied recipient is of course less likely to reply.
Here is a short description of the problems inherent in these messages that I receive from Outlook (and sometimes Outlook Express too):
- HTML-formatted
- Non-standard ‘HTML’ (Microsoft Office inclination, MSIE-centric)
- Roughly 38 kilobyte even for a one-liner (an enormous non-standards compliant ‘style sheet’ is prepended)
- 10-line signature (Outlook does not warn or deter)
- No signature delimiter (breaking all RFC standards)
- Always top-posted, not trimmed and lacking context (Outlook is definitely not helping by creating new lines and putting the cursor at the top)
- In quotes, re-wrapping is broken and irregular symbols get inserted sporadically
There is no gentle way to approach the issue, but one such person learned to at least stick to plain-text (owing to a kind request). The top posting habits remain though. Outlook Express requires QuoteFix, which is addon software/hack, just to stop this default behaviour and make bottom posting practical. So there is no subtle way to suggesting others to improve their posting habits, unfortunately. To them, the Windows/Microsoft way is the right way. Acceptable standards lose their value when a desktop monopoly simply ignores them.
Some time ago I wrote some notes on how to begin loving E-mail again , which reminds me of an old favourite that is titled the UseNet improvement project.
