On 10/10/2009, at 11:15 PM, Steven Knowles wrote:
I'm trying to convince a friend of mine to stay with Apple's Mail as
a mail client, however there are two problems with Mail in his eyes.
One is bullet points which don't seem to appear as bullet points at
the recipient end (I've experienced that as well).
The other is the absence of a ruler when composing messages, which,
as an ex Windows user, he got used to in Outlook.
Does anyone know of any plugins which enhance Mail in this regard?
Or is there an alternative mail application which brings both of
these features more in line with Outlook on Windows. There's
Entourage of course, and he does have Entourage installed and will
have a look at it, but I'd like to let him know of any other options.
Cheers, Steven
These requests always make me sigh. HTML email is probably one of the
greatest crimes that Microsoft has perpetrated against the world of
computing. As others in this thread have pointed out, the only ones
who are guaranteed to see the email in the format in which is was
originally written is the Sender! There is absolutely no way to
control what email client the recipient is using. For example, one
client of mine insisted on continuing to use Pine in a Telnet session
to his mail server (Pine is a purely text-based email client, and is
totally incapable of interpreting formatted email of any sort).
Consequently, over 50% of the email he received was incomprehensible
to him.
As has been pointed out on this list countless times, the email format
is pure text. That's all. This is the reason why pictures, sounds,
movies, etc, have to be sent as attachments. They cannot be embedded
into the message. Any embellishments such as HTML rely on the email
recipient being able to handle them. Windows users have been duped
into believing that HTML email is the norm. Unfortunately, the world
of internet standards disagrees with them, but still companies such as
Microsoft and Intellimail (gasp!) blunder on. One of the reasons that
many Windows users get confused with this is that MS Outlook is
usually set up to use Word as its default editor! No wonder confusion
reigns supreme!
Not even Apple is guiltless in this area. Windows switchers coming to
Mail are often completely confused by having attachments such as PDFs
and JPGs appearing to open within the body of the email. This is a
trick by Apple (useful though it may be) to allow the recipient to
view the contents of certain attachments without having to download
them first. Nevertheless, they remain attachments. The addition of
HTML templates in Leopard also hasn't really helped either. Just Apple
saying If You Can't Beat 'em, Join 'em.
If your friend really has to have rulers and bullet lists, point him
in the direction of Thunderbird or Seamonkey, which do have this stuff
built in.
--
Peter Hinchliffe Apwin Computer Services
FileMaker Pro Solutions Developer
Perth, Western Australia
Phone (618) 9332 6482 Mob 0403 064 948
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Mac because I prefer it -- Windows because I have to.
-- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List --
Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml>
Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml>
Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
