Microsoft: Outlook is Not “Broken”
technologizer.com
technologizer.com
As long as they're sending the e-mail to someone who also has Outlook and who isn't using the Outlook Web Access on their exchange server :)
Seriously though Microsoft's obviously trying to shift the issue to Outlook's use of Word when really the issue is how bad their Word engine renders HTML (though I do think "fixoutlook.org" picked the very worst example for their comparison). It's a good way to win an argument but a bad way to take product suggestions.
To be fair- GMail doesn't display background colors either.
Outlook is broken only if you give a shit about openness or standards. Most people don't. Most people want to solve the problems immediately before them to make their lives easier. This Outlook achieves with aplomb.
Moreover the merit of this piece is that it's a short synopsis of the entire story. You can think the article you link to has more validity as the original source and it's your choice to vote that one up and not this one. But it's kind of rude to call this post names simply because you deem it unworthy.
Furthermore, I think that this blog is unfairly omitting details from the source material. The official blog post includes significant details about the editing experience of Microsoft Word. The quote in the intermediate blog post does not capture the nature of the Outlook team's argument.
Even if the intermediate post did represent the argument accurately, it includes editorialization which I'd rather see in comments.
Both HN submissions used the official title, as they are supposed to. I posit that this secondary source was upvoted more because of the more dramatic title. The posters are to blame for the discrepancy, not the HN submitters. My apologies for the meta-discussion, but I don't think I'm the only person who doesn't like intermediate, no-value-added blog posts.
My only counter point is that your opinion is worth your one up vote which you most certainly shouldn't give to this post.
Put another way I don't see any paticular problem with you posting a link to the original submission. My only issue was the indication that the person who submitted this story was guilty of wrong doing (again I think the brevity of the article does add value so I don't think it would count as blog spam even under your definition).
Just for things like headings and bullet points.
I can very happily live without tables (attach a spreadsheet if it is important), css (let the text of my email be dictated by my client) and images (again, attach).
But the need for headings and lists means that I do use HTML or Rich-Text (depending on the client) when it's available even though I seldom use anything beyond simple formatting.
Oh, and we use RT as a help desk/support software, and that uses plain text. And I speak from experience that when you get a lengthy description of an issue turned into plain text it's very difficult to read. Headings and bullet points are pretty important.
Our email system is outdated and kludgey, people try to use it for file transfers, document management, instant messaging, photo sharing, etc. Spam is constantly an annoyance that despite wonderful filtering, probably can't be designed out of smtp. There's no easy way to have verifications of sender identity, or even have control over who's allowed to send mail for your domain. (domain keys, and spf records work, but most mail server will accept your mail anyway - We had a dns/ip change forced upon us and the tech forgot to update our spf records and we didn't notice a problem for a week. Some mail servers just tagged us as "possible" spam. The sad situation seems to be that a lot of spf records are wrong.)
What I would really like to see is a way to federate Facebook messaging. I'm picking them for no reason other then a large user base, real names (mostly), built in spam protection and controls, video messaging, the ability to share content and have it highlighted in special ways. (It would then need file transfer support and maybe voice chat.) Oh and it shouldn't be Facebook it should be an open protocol.
I guess what I'm describing isn't email, I just want it to replace email. Also ever since I saw the google tech demo, every message lately is looking like a "wave". That kind of rich messaging is what users look for. The reason something hasn't taken over email yet (I'm willing to guess) is that we don't all want one company being in charge of it. Jabber (the core tech behind wave) is free and open source and a known protocol that solves a lot if not all my gripes. And most importantly anyone can run it.
I wouldn't have any desire to limit the richness of messages displayable on common readers, if it weren't for unwanted email (quasi-spam from companies I did business with once, to say nothing of random malicious spam, which automatically justifies extreme simplification of accepted mail markup for security's sake).
Even when the visually rich email is safe, it makes unwanted email even more annoying for the brief second it flashes on screen before I delete it.
The vast majority of messages from actual humans in my inbox are composed in plain-text. That doesn't mean it's sent to me in plain text, of course, but as far as the user is concerned they're typing in plain text without marking it up. The major culprit of fancy HTML shenanigans in this type of email is business-card like signatures (totally unnecessary).
Messages which are intentionally formatted in HTML in order to display elaborate things come almost entirely (I'd say 99%) from websites (travelocity, evite), corporate newsletters, spammers, credit-card companies, etc. If those senders were restricted to plain text, those emails would most likely have less crap and more content which is pertinent to me. You don't need complex formatting to let me know my flight information, the my statement is available, or that my password has been successfully reset.
Standardized formatting is important... I'm not saying that we should be restricted to a plan-text only world of email. But formatting restrictions aren't necessarily a bad thing (for extreme example, see Twitter). Just as email doesn't function well as a medium for sending large attachments, it similarly shouldn't be conceived of as a medium for displaying complex, elaborately formatted documents. That's what web browsers, word processors, and spreadsheet programs are for.
Markdown, Basic HTML (1.0), or similar concepts are more than enough to convey your message clearly and directly, while allowing composers to organize their thoughts and link/include non-text information.
Yes, mail clients should support plain text only, the world would be a much better place.
Their core customer is Janice from Accounting, who sits on the Party Planning committee at BigCo. and wants to send out an invite to the company's Thanksgiving Party, for which she has selected some excellent WordArt to use.
It's Phil the low-level VB.net developer, whose idea of version control is sending an email to himself with a huge attachment every night so he can recover off that if need be.
It's Stacy from HR, whose email signature is in a pink script font, so that we know she's given that email a personal touch when she "signs" it like that.
That's who Outlook is designed for - big corporate offices, where all 90% of the people want is to be able to send colorful emails with a drag-and-drop toolbar using an interface they are already intimately familiar with. And by that standard, their customers probably love the decision to use Word's authoring engine, and will simply blame the people they got the email from when it doesn't look right.
Think of it this way: if you even know this controversy exists, you're a more technical user than those which Outlook is designed for.