Everybody hates spam. What's spam? Been on the Internet for a while? Then you know what spam is- it's unwanted e-mail solicitations for everything from multilevel marketing schemes to porno sites. For more details, see this page about what to do about spam.
But this page isn't about spam. It's about something that is nearly as bad as spam, that wastes almost as much bandwidth, and clogs e-mail boxes and hard disks on servers and user's computers to almost the same degree. It comes in several categories, listed in decreasing order of bandwidth-hogging.
I'm not against these things across the board. But they are so over-used, misused, and abused, and waste so much of my time and disk space, that I had to speak out. And where these abuses really shine is in e-mail reflectors and groups. There's nothing like some moron submitting a prettified e-mail with HTML formatting and a pretty JPG background to an e-mail list, only to have the list owner's servers crank out a few thousand or tens of thousands of copies to its subscribers.
1. HTML Mail · Turning HTML Off · 2. Picture Mail · Turning Off Pictures
E-mail was meant as a text communication method. It's pretty dull. But it's fast and efficient. Nowadays people attach files to e-mail messages routinely. No problem there-- the recipient usually expects to get aforementioned file or files. Then again, the World Wide Web is, well, World Wide Web. It was conceived and designed to handle text as well as a rich graphical environment. It uses HTML to accomplish this.
Now take HTML and E-mail and combine them. Stir vigorously. What do you have? Messages with cute fonts in different sizes and colors, with pictures embedded in them, perhaps even sounds or multimedia stuff. Pop the hood, take a closer look. What do you see? The message as plain text, followed by the same message again, with elaborate HTML formatting around it.
Never saw that before? Must be using a Microsoft product. Outlook Express / Outlook don't let you see the actual message. Does everyone on the Internet think that the entire world is using Outlook?
Think about this for a moment: The smallest message you can send with this option turned on cannot be as small as twice as big as it should be. No matter what, it's going to be twice the size plus all the formatting. The text is in the message twice, and then some.
One 4-line message (with short lines) was duplicated as a 14 line HTML formatted one within the message. A more typical one was
| Actual Text | 14 lines | 488 characters |
| HTML formatted | 34 lines | 2077 characters |
| Total | 48 lines | 2565 characters |
Was there really any need to expand this short message by nearly 80 percent? It's 5.256 times as big as it needs to be.
What John Doe does when he has this option on affects him, his ISP, the intervening servers, his recipient's ISP, and his recipient. Other ISPs that might route through some of the same machines are affected by the excess traffic too.
But that's nothing compared to dumping that all out hundreds of times a day to potentially thousands of recipients.
Moral of the story: Turn off HTML formatted mail.
How to turn off HTML formatting in Microsoft® Outlook / Outlook Express:
Click Tools, Options, then click the Send tab. Under Mail Sending Format, click Plain Text. Under News Sending Format, click Plain Text.
It's not bad enough that we have to put up with HTML mail, now we have to have all the little background pictures that people want to include in their e-mails accumulate in out attachments directory. Presumably, Outlook and its kin dispose of them once the message is discarded. If the whole world were Microsoft, Inc, that wouldn't be a problem. But Microsoft didn't add extensions to the MIME suite, nor did they choose to work with the Internet community. The result is that those cute little 3, 4, 5kb (and etc) jpegs pile up in one's attachments directory. Remember that 488 byte message? Now it's 5637 bytes, because it's HTML formatted with a little 3kb background graphic that looks like blurry sandstone. If you must send HTML mail, at least turn off the bloody pictures.
How to turn off picture transmission in Microsoft® Outlook / Outlook Express:
Click Tools, Options, then click the Send tab. Under Mail Sending Format, next to HTML, click the Settings button. Remove the checkmark from the box "Send Pictures With Messages".
Do the same for News Sending Format.
3. VCF Files, aka Business Cards
I'm not opposed to the concept of VCF, either. VCF files are virtual business cards, transmitted by a variety of devices and programs, containing contact information. I've read RFC xxxx and yyyy and I think the idea could be a great one. But don't send VCFs to a newsgroup or e-mail reflector. They just sit on many recipients hard disks, doing nothing but take up space..