I got your emails, sent enthusiastically from your respective Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger, and Eudora 4.0 clients. But I have to say, I'm not impressed. In fact, I'm actually underwhelmed by what *you* often *deposited* in my own HTML-enabled Hotmail in-box.

Here's what happened:

I signed up for Hotmail, the free service that gives you an email account that's accessible from any graphically-enabled browser. Upon registration, I was instantly able to begin receiving all the email addressed to my Hotmail account, singsongline@hotmail.com. Even better, I discovered that I could use the Hotmail interface to download my POP email from my account at work. So, for the duration of this experiment, all my mail ended up in the same place. Pretty spiffy, I thought. To top it all off, I signed up for daily HTML-enriched newsletters from the likes of Wired, News.Com, Slate, and the ZD Anchor Desk.

___Off to a Good Start with Hotmail_______

I wasn't disappointed by what I saw from the professional services. Every morning, I opened mail that walked and talked like Web pages, complete with great layout, graphical images, brief synopses of stories, and easy-to-follow links. Wired and News.Com's features and news articles had never looked better in my email box. Each of these services had given me the ultimate in low-tech push technology. Why go out to the Web, when you can have the Web's front page come to your in-box, always available to return to later for reference?

But the novelty wore off. I wondered, "Was all this new HTML email really that different from the Wired, C|Net News, and Slate dispatches that I had already been receiving in plain text?" Not really. With HTML email, there was more glitz and glamour. But the links in the ASCII version were equivalent, and so was the content that I read when I followed the link to the site from my trustworthy old Eudora 2.2. So let's just say that despite the new look of the HTML newsletters, I was just as happy with the less showy plaintext versions.

___Then Things Went Wrong, Terribly Wrong_________
    (When You Started Sending Me Email)

What a disaster. Nearly everything I got from you Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger, or Eudora 4.0 users was either a jumbled mess of exposed HTML coding or a graphic designer's worst nightmare. Graphics were missing from nearly all of your posts; instead I'd get the dreaded red X in IE. When images did come through, I found them at the bottom of your notes, floating, unlinked, and alone. Now you tell me you didn't intend them to look like that. If that weren't enough, rich text came in colors I know you never would have used, since I couldn't read a thing. Fonts were sometimes illegible.

___Exposed HTML Gets My Dander Up_______

I think the worst part for me was the exposed HTML. How frustrating to get page after page of raw tags staring me in the face. If I didn't know better -- but I do -- I'd begin to think that you just don't know how to properly send HTML email with your Outlook Express and Netscape Messenger clients. Seeing the exposed code when you're trying to read an email, is that frustrating! Maybe it's just that the protocols still need some more tweaking. In any case, Kim does have the right idea in saying that she'd never send HTML email to anyone, unless she knows the recipient has an HTML-enabled client. Let's make that a rule.

___Curt's Final Analysis_______

Here's what I got in Hotmail. I can't say what, in the end, gave me such poor results on my end.

Rich text: Hotmail usually saw and displayed all your bold, italics, and cutesy fonts. However, colors were changed.
Hyperlinks: They worked, but most often the images were missing, or Hotmail recognized an http:// and converted it into a clickable link.
Embedded Images: No way; these were what I found straggling at the footer of every message sent.
Sends HTML: Not really. I sent out valid HTML that was displayed with exposed code by Netscape Messenger and Outlook Express. Hotmail's documentation is unclear on the issue of sending HTML in email, but HTML is properly displayed if sent from one Hotmail account to another. No matter what you do, there's a catch: You're forced to code it all by hand or cut and paste a valid HTML file into Hotmail's message window. Hotmail has no built in HTML-coding tools as of this writing.

___TTFN_____________

Take care, HTML senders and fellow experimenters. I'm just hoping that in the future, I'll be receiving nice, well-thought-out ASCII text email, from you and from everyone else I know. <H3>I'm <B><I>really</I></B> tired of <I>reading between the tags</I>.</H3>

Peace,

Curt

I can't wait to see how D.C. figures out this mess , what with some of us actually liking HTML email, and some of us hating it.