Broken mail (was: What annoys me more...)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday, 20 August 2004 at  0:57:26 +0100, John Murphy wrote:
> Can't resist sticking my 2P worth in here, sorry.
>
> What annoys me more than top-posting or html postings is the tendency
> of MS email clients to horribly reformat quoted text so that odd words
> appear on a line by themselves.

Indeed.

> I've even seen it happen to original text when the poster hits CR at
> some presumably inappropriate time.
>
> Never used Outlook or Outlook Express myself but I get the
> impression that what they see is NOT what they send.

I used to think that too, for the obvious reason that you can't
understand why anybody would send such a broken message.  Since then,
I've come to the realization that yes, indeed, a very large number of
people *do* send obviously broken text.  The main reason seems to be
that it's just too difficult to get right.

For example, I recently received a message reply in plain text that,
apart from breaking chronological sequence ("top posting"), was
relatively legible:

  I think I heard about this scanner before. It should be fine just to
  bring in, but the problem I have is that we don't offer refunds. We can
  credit your account, but if you want a credit, I'll need to see
  something from Canon authorising it, then I'll need to talk to the
  managing director about it. If you're happy with just a credit, please
  fill in the attached form, and when it comes in I'll do the credit
  straight away. Other than that, the procedure is exactly the same as a
  normal warranty.

The attached form was a Microsoft "Word" document, so I bounced it to
my Microsoft box (which I have to maintain for work) and looked at it
with "Outlook".  There the text was displayed like this:

  I think I heard about this scanner before. It should be fine just to bring in, but the problem I have is that we don't offer refunds. We can credit your account, but if
  you want a credit, I'll need to see something from Canon authorising it, then I'll need to talk to the managing director about it. If you're happy with just a credit, 
  please fill in the attached form, and when it comes in I'll do the credit straight away. Other than that, the procedure is exactly the same as a normal warranty.

When copying it, it was a single line.  On resizing the window, the
line breaks changed.  In other words, "Outlook" deliberately breaks
the format.  That doesn't improve it even under Microsoft.  It seems
that people learn to live with this.  I can't understand why Microsoft
does it, though.

Here's another example, sent by a professional who should know
better.  

  Rather than your guidelines graham which are difficult to operationalise, it
  
  makes sense to me to frame it as a risk management policy - for both open 
  standards compliant and non compliant software.
  
  The attached paper, (pps30-34 together with the references) is a good guide
  to 
  this, of course it needs perhaps more attention to the non compliant
  software 
  scenario and I am sure that MS's site will happily have that covered. ;-)

This message was displayed in exactly the same way under mutt.  One
other thing, though: it took me forever to find the mutt version.
"Outlook", it does not display the date the message was sent, at least
not by default.  The only headers shown are the To: and Cc: headers,
and even there the email addresses have been stripped.  There's a date
in the index, but it's wrong; I suppose it's the date that the message
arrived on the box, which is really useful.  I notice also that this
message states:

  Extra line breaks in this message were removed.

That's probably why it starts with:

  Brenda Thanks, I'll read this and see what we come up with, (let's do anything so as not to re-invent the wheel!)

In the original, it was two well-spaced lines.

In general, then, it seems to me that "Outlook" displays text at least
as badly under Microsoft as it does under UNIX.  It's just that the
Microsoft users seem to accept it.

I'm sure that it's possible to configure "Outlook" to be less stupid.
But how many people do that?

I've looked through my "Outlook" inbox for other examples.  What I
can't find is an easily legible message.  Even when there is no
obvious breakage, I find messages sent with "Outlook" or other
Microsoft-based MUAs to be very difficult to read.

Greg
--
Note: I discard all HTML mail unseen.
Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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