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HTML email is evil. It adds incredible amounts of bulk to mail and is potentially insecure. Some recipients resent it, and many email lists flat out forbid it, including one that I have helped to manage for over ten years.
An old friend, someone I’ve known for over forty years, is an AOL subscriber. No amount of searching has enabled him to send simple, straightforward, plain text mail, even after a couple of lengthy phone discussions with tech support. We’ve finally given up on it. One day I illustrated it for him.
To understand this, you must know that Tom has one of the most beautiful gardens you will ever see. I told him:
Say that you hired a company to come and help you regularly a couple of times a year with certain garden chores, such as the lawn work, or cutting back dead wood in the treed areas. Say that you were perfectly happy with the service, except for one thing, namely that the company insisted on leaving behind an array of pink plastic flamingos in various strategic and highly visible points your garden. No doubt you would tell them thank you very much for the thoughtful touch, but you really would prefer not to have the pink plastic flamingos. But then a customer service representative of your service said, “But everyone gets and likes the pink plastic flamingos. Why on earth would you not want the pink plastic flamingos? Sorry, that’s not an option — we don’t support service without pink plastic flamingos.”
That would be an accurate description of AOL’s garden service department, if they had a garden service department.
Related articles
- Pink Flamingos on Your Lawn (gomestic.com)
- Pretty in Pink and Gregarious Too (ourpeaceablekingdom.wordpress.com)
