E-mail is text, possibly with links and multimedia attachments such as photos. It’s entirely beyond my understanding why this is a problem for most people: I get plenty of e-mail bloated up with HTML and CSS, including some that use such offbeat color schemes (Yellow on hot pink? I’m expected to be able to read that?) that I usually end up copy-and-pasting the message contents into Notepad to read them.
Someone apparently had the bright idea to include stationery in e-mail. This goes a few steps beyond letterhead – they can range from a gradient on the side to a frowning image of Lil Wayne giving some gang hand symbol.
Within the past month, though, some people have apparently had the excellent idea to take the text out of e-mail completely, and send the entire message as a JPEG or PNG image. Though I haven’t asked, the apparent justification is to make leaves curl around letters, delimit new lines using ten-cent coins, and to give the entire message an elongated vertical white-to-yellow gradient.
I’d like to ask now… Is it really necessary to send me 3MB e-mails addressed to 700 people and containing the message body in a JPEG image, making for two ways I can’t easily sync them with my handheld?