I’m not sure how long this has been up on the Apple web site. I’ve never noticed it before.

Apple has created a preview of the HTML Stationery that will be available in Leopard Mail.

As regular readers of Hawk Wings will already expect, I’m not big fan. But don’t let that rob you of the pleasure you’ll no doubt get from exploring the kinds of productivity leaps that Leopard Mail will offer.

The nine examples fall into standard stationery categories — thank-yous, news, get well soon messages, invitations, Valentine’s Day and so on.

Here are just two examples of what we can look forward to, a thank-you and a Birthday email:

“Mail. You’ve got more”, reads the tag line on the Apple web site.

Never a truer word. mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, stationery, html, oh dear, email

Washington Post blogger Brian Krebs uses the recent release of a Windows security patch to fire up the campaign to end HTML email.

He reminds his readers that “viewing your e-mail in anything other than plain text mode is asking for trouble on a Windows computer.”

He then proceeds to list some of the reasons why HTML should be avoided, including better protection against phishing attacks, avoiding “spam touting graphic images from adult Web sites” and not seeing your own HTML emails end up in someone else’s spam folder. (See a much more comprehensive list of reasons on the Free Anti Spam web site.)

Instructions are provided on using plain text in Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Opera. These might be useful for Hawk Wings readers in a distressing work environment.

Mail.app users have at least three ways to deal with incoming HTML emails—see an earlier Hawk Wings post, “Viewing HTML messages in Apple Mail“).

I am a fan of the first, most brutal option myself, but I am also a realist. See further King Canute (Wikipedia ).

UPDATE: Nicholas takes a different view . “Arguing that email users should not have access to different fonts or colours is much like arguing that they should still be using the word processors of 1987 as well,” he suggests.

[Thanks, Michael]mail.app, apple mail, windows, outlook, html, plain text, thunderbird, opera, outlook express

It’s not nice for Mac users to laugh at those who are less fortunate, but when the situation involves a intoxicating mix of Microsoft, email marketers and HTML email, the temptation becomes irresistible.

Outlook 2007 is making a change in the way that it renders HTML email. In the past it used the rendering engine in Internet Explorer, but now it is switching to the less fully-featured rendering engine in Word 2007.

According to Campaign Monitor, this is a disastrous step which “takes email design back 5 years”.

In particular, Outlook 2007 users will find the following things missing from their HTML emails:

1. No background images – Background images in divs and table cells are gone….
2. Poor background color support – Give a div or table cell a background color, add some text to it and the background color displays fine. Nest another table or div inside though and the background color vanishes.
3. No support for float or position – Completely breaking any CSS based layouts right from the word go. Tables only.
4. Shocking box model support – Very poor support for padding and margin, and you thought IE5 was bad!

Campaign Monitor carries an image of how the same email laid out with CSS looks in Outlook 2000 and 2007:

Email marketers are steaming with rage . They will have to redesign all their HTML marketing templates as Office 2007 starts to spread through the corporate and home user markets.

In an interesting twist, some takes this as a tacit admission by Microsoft that the HTML engine in Internet Explorer 7 is still a security liability.

The most important thing Mail.app users can do about this is to keep themselves clean by resisting the Schadenfreude tsunami. microsoft, email, html, outlook, rendering, plaintext rOxOrs, schadenfreude

Hawk Wings reader and iLounge writer Jesse David Hollington got to play with an iPhone briefly at MWSF and to ask Apple a few direct questions about the email client on the iPhone.

He emails to say that it was a brief encounter (five minutes with the people from Apple and a 45 second play with the device), but still:

I had noticed your entry on Hawk Wings about 30 minutes before we went in, so we were able to pose the question to Apple specifically as to whether rich-text e-mail was supported, and the answer I posted was basically their answer. When asked whether the Mail application on the iPhone was a “pared-down” version of Apple Mail, they basically responded in somewhat non-committal PR-speak.

Apple confirmed that composing in true HTML is not possible. It looks more and more like “Mail.app Mobile” to me.

You read the full write-up of the iLounge team’s impressions on the iLounge site .mail.app, apple mail, iphone, apple, rich html, html, mobile, cell phone, PR spin

Of course, there was only one real question of any importance during the Keynote yesterday: What email client is iPhone using?

Apple doesn’t call it Apple Mail in the same way as it calls the phone’s browser Safari. It describes the email app as,

…a rich HTML email client that fetches your email in the background from most POP3 or IMAP mail services and displays photos and graphics right along with the text.

Is it a stripped-down version of Apple Mail all done over with eye-candy or something else? What is “rich HTML”?

After watching the Keynote a few times and viewing the videos in the new iPhone section of the Apple web site, I think that that “rich HTML” is a term designed to appeal to Windows users. Mail.app users are used to the distinction between “Rich Text” and HTML email, and Mail’s ability to compose only in the former whilst happily displaying the latter.

There is nothing in the Keynote or videos to suggest anything more advanced (or depraved, depending on your point of view about HTML email) than Mail.app’s existing capabilities.

There is no composing in HTML and nothing on display that suggests more advanced HTML rendering. The only list I can see is marked with hyphens, not bullets, although presumably it wasn’t composed on an iPhone:

So I am guessing that is not a new custom-made client but a cut-down version of Mail.app, “Mail Mobile” as it were. What do you think?

Australians won’t get their hands on one until sometime in 2008, so someone else will know the answer before I do. mail.app, apple mail, iphone, mwsf, keynote, html, rich text, email client

As everyone knows, Mail.app doesn’t offer a default option for composing HTML emails. No one feels neutral about this; people either love or hate it.

If you fall into the latter category, check out LetterPop , a new HTML newsletter creation web app, which promises another option to existing workarounds like these three (“Composing HTML messages in Mail.app”) or using TextMate as an external editor.

It was recently hyped by Lifehacker as “the first must-see web app of 2007″.

The app is essentially a web-based WYSIWIG HTML editor. Once you have created an account, you can upload images and shoe-horn them into a limited number of templates, mainly of the “What I did on my holidays” variety. The templates also offer a varying number of test boxes for your news.

Create a mailing list by adding contacts to the address book in your LetterPop account (a nice quick-add feature is provided), and a mail-out about your flash newsletter is just a few button presses away.

Recipients don’t actually get a copy of the newsletter though. They get an invitation to visit the LetterPop web site and view it there:

It has just launched and is a true “Web 2.0″ beta (the only one apart from Stikkit ?), so you may find your artistic options restricted.

Still, you can quickly knock out something respectable:

One note of warning: The number of Safari-unfriendly sites is declining, but this is one. I had to use Firefox to upload images.

LetterPop is free. Privacy mavens may want to consider the site’s privacy policy which contains the following statements:

81 miles may, at its discretion, use this information for the following general purposes: to customize the advertising and content you see, fulfill your requests for products and services, improve our services, contact you, conduct research, and provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients.

and

In the course of operating our business it may be necessary or appropriate for us to provide access to your personal information to others such as our service providers, contractors and select vendors so that we can operate 81 Miles and other related entities. Where practical, we seek to obtain confidentiality agreements that are consistent with this policy and that limit others’ use or disclosure of the information you have shared.

[Via DownloadSquad ]html, newsletters, mail outs, email, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, safari

I’ve got to mark exam papers now. No more blogging for me.

The rest of tonight’s Hawk Wings comes to you in brief:

1. Chris Campbell at particletree has collected six posts on email and how to manage it better. Most of them have been covered here over the past year, but it’s good to see them together in one place. [Via 43Folders ]
2. Take Control Books is holding “a 50% off sale” on its ebooks to celebrate its third anniversary. Titles like Take Control of .Mac, Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger and Take Control of Spam in Apple Mail are going out the door for a song.
3. Mez Hopking has posted a nice tutorial on making a fancy signature in Mail.app, but it’s a bit old school in parts now.

mail.app, apple mail, ebooks, email, signatures, html, tips