Folks, I hate to inject some common sense in this debate ;-), but not everyone
has or is likely to get the latest computer hardware. At L-Soft, most of the PCs
on people's desks are Pentium 90-133. A lot of them were bought in 95 when
this was pretty much the best you could get, and the rest are former servers
that we recycled as desktop machines after upgrading the servers because we
had to. These are GOOD machines, especially the servers. We haven't had a
single problem with any of these machines. When I visit a customer, on the
other hand, there is always some poor sod whose PC is busted or where the
screen cannot be made not to flicker or whatever. But then, the machines they
put on people's desks are much cheaper (or sometimes much older). Anyway,
my point is that these machines are reliable and one cannot make the case
that they need to be upgraded because they are too old and will only
cost more manpower in troubleshooting if we don't.

Anyway, with a P90 and 32M of RAM, you can read e-mail very comfortably.
This is important because the company revolves around e-mail. A situation
where people only check their mail once in a while because the computer is
slow would be unacceptable, but luckily this is not the case. A P90 with 32M
of RAM also makes a pretty decent browsing machine, even with the latest
and hugest browsers that manage to exhaust memory even on my PC, which
has 96M. But HTML mail is kind of slow. It's slower than accessing a local web
site with your browser because more memory is used (you have two active
programs using inefficient interfaces to talk to each other) and with only 32M you
are paging. Some people don't mind this, most do. It's ok if you get 5 messages
a day, but try 100+. It got a lot better when I upgraded my P90 to a Pentium II
with 96M, but there was a valid, unrelated reason for upgrading my PC. And
even now, I resent HTML mail because there is still a noticeable pause before
the message is shown, and I get 100+ messages per day.

And most importantly, people like the e-mail program they've been using for years.
They don't want to switch to a FREE program that has half the features just so
that they can have to wait longer to see the next message.

Don't get me wrong, we do take full advantage of new technology and so on.
We use multimedia mail and everything when the situation warrants it. A typical
business e-mail message simply does not warrant the addition of large pink
text to make a point. When discussing the layout of the T-shirts for the release
of 1.8d, on the other hand, an enclosed JPG makes a lot of sense. If it makes
sense, we do it, but no, we're not going to upgrade all the PCs and force
everyone to switch to less sophisticated e-mail clients just so that we can
send mail in HTML format. It simply doesn't make business sense, and you'll
find that we're not the only company with this attitude to the problem. Actually,
we're probably more likely to use new technology than average because this
is our industry and we are well aware of the advantages. It is also our everyday
job and we don't go "WOW, I just received an e-mail with text in three
different colours! AWESOME!" :-)

This being said, every list is different, and what you do is up to you. We've
chosen to use attachments and HTML mail liberally whenever the situation
warrants it, and to ban these things when there is no valid reason to use
them. You are free to encourage the addition of a 50k picture of the sender
if this is what works for your list. Just don't expect me to subscribe :-)

  Eric