Gimme some help (to insomniacs and early risers out there)

[matgb]

My company is going through a process of corporate branding and agreed styles. Given some of the people we employ, in my opinion, this is a Good Thing. Unfortunately, sometimes the agreed styles aren't what I would choose. Sometimes, they're well, a Bad Thing.

By about mid afternoon tomorrow, I and one colleague have to have enough evidence together to convince the bosses that using rich text formatting on emails with embedded company logos for correspondence is a Bad Idea.

1) Compatability issues.

2) Bandwidth and filesize issues

3 [the big one]) Spam filters.

I know I've read a study online,r ecently, which criticised Amazon and similar for sending order confirmations in rich text with embedded pictures as these would trigger many spam filters. I also know this to be true, as I found 3 emails from Amazon in my junkmail folders.

Can I find it online? Can I buggery. I tried searching using amazon in the string, but half the web links to Amazon so that didn't help.

So, any concerned citizens of the net out there that can assist in my research in any way, very much appreciated. Email should be plain text, anything else is unnecessary wastage. Why is it hard to explain this to people? We do business all over the world, we have no idea what our clients use to read their email, nor do we know what campatibiltity issues may be created, and we CANNOT afford to have our messages trigger spam filters.

On an entirely unrelated note; can anyone recommend some software I can download that I can use to store CDs as MP3s on my harddrive and play them? I don't need to download stuff, I can just store it and play it, right?

Comments

here's a couple to be getting along with...

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

http://www.evolt.org/article/HTML_Email_Isn_t_Rich/25/53732/ - "HTML Email Isn't Rich" - interesting, has good counter arguments that may help in preparing for the if they crop up in the meeting.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1011343 - "Spam Fighters Block Legit E-mail" - mostly involves hotmail and yahoo!mail but seems to have been written specifically for you, if i've read your post correctly... ¬.¬

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

http://www.hothouse.com.au/news/archives.asp?iNewsID=10 - summary: "A lot of debate has taken place on the HTML vs. text-only format question, and almost all commentators agree on one thing: if you're asking whether HTML or text-only is the one to use, you're asking the wrong question."

[matgb]

This one I like a lot, thanks :-)

bed? naaaah...

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

http://www.computerweekly.com/Article112309.htm - "Should we ban email?" - er, no?!

http://afongen.com/blog/archives/000300.php#000300 - "Internet filtering found damaging to education." - not sure if it's relevant, but meh.

http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:LO-Ion1j4oIJ:ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~edtech/attachments.pdf+email+bandwidth+%22rich+text%22+compatibility+&hl=en - "Email attachments: best practices" - originaly pdf, but html is quicker and doesn't feck up firefox (on my laptop anyway) admittedly, this is about attachments as opposed to the actual emails themselves.

http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/evilmail.html - "Why HTML in Email is a Bad Idea" - looks promising... very promising...

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

*impatiently waits for the results of the meeting...*

fingers crossed for you mat :)

[matgb]

Not a meeting actually, it's more like an ongoing argument in which we have to fire off the first email when the marketing guy gets back to his office, now delayed until tomorrow. But Tristram found all your links useful, thanks muchly.

[johnwordsworth.livejournal.com]

Software I can recommend for converting tracks on CD to MP3s on your PC is called dbPowerAmp. Now, it doesn't play MP3s - so if you're desperate to get software that does both - sorry, but it's a great bit of software that comes with a CD ripping app that just lets you tick the boxes and click 'convert'. Select MP3 and where you want them to go, and you're done.

As for playing MP3s - I can suggest Winamp. If you download the 'lite version', it's pretty quick to load up and doesn't use many resources.

Looks like I've missed the deadline for the other part of your post. I hope you convinced them, but they're probably stupid - so I'm not sure how much hope there really was for these people... "It's clearly better - it's prettier". Like scrolling text and animated gifs. Retards.

[matgb]

Actually, the argument got delayed; the marketing manager is away from his office again (that's his job, can't complain about that) so Tristram and I are delaying for a day. Freddie found me lots of good stuff though; anything extra you can provide much appreciated though.

Thanks for hte software suggestion, I'll look into DLing something at work tomorrow.

[johnwordsworth.livejournal.com]

This is perhaps not one-sided enough to help you win the argument above, but it might be useful in explaining things to your colleagues;
http://www.netconcepts.com/betterdeliverability.htm

This, on the other hand - is much more what you need (but might not seem as reliable a resource);
http://www.chilkatsoft.com/faq/YahooSpam.html

Sorry if you already have these links. I've just looked at your comment from my email, and I can't see the links that Fred has posted - I hope I've not posted duplicates!

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

no you haven't :)

[matgb]

No, no dupes, and both pretty useful, read them at work today. Especially liked the breakdown of the points thing, that'll help. Now I need to summarise the lot into about 2 paragraphs and some bullet points.