Guy Kawasaki has a great post today about email etiquette. I agree with pretty much all of his rules, but there is one that should have a series of treatises written about it:

Use plain text. I hate HTML email. I tried it for a while, but it’s not worth the trouble of sending or receiving it. All those pretty colors and fancy type faces and styles make me want to puke. Cut to the chase: say what you have to say in as brief and plain manner as possible. If you can’t say it in plain text, you don’t have anything worth saying.

Amen. I could write 10,000 words and not begin to tell you how much I dislike html emails. I don’t get many html emails at home, since most of the people who email me at home fall on either end of the html email spectrum: they either don’t know how to send an html email or they know better.

But at the office- that’s a horse of another color. Typically a pastel color, with little cats or bears or yodas or something on them that is intended as stationary but ends up as rage inducing fluff. I would guess that around half the emails I get at the office are html email. The colorful text is bad enough, but the fancy, funky, indecipherable fonts on top of the wild colors and dancing yodas turn communication into frustration.

Outlook lets you force emails to display as plain text, and I use that feature some. But elaborate emails that contain something I need to read can get all jumbled up when transformed from foolishness to function.

I really, really, really don’t like html email.

Months after I got invited to beta test Gmail and Windows Live Mail (the upcoming successor to Hotmail), I finally got my invitation to beta test the new version of Yahoo Mail the other day. Now that I’ve used all three, here are three things I like and three I don’t about each.

Was the wait for Yahoo Mail worth it? Maybe- it’s pretty cool. Let’s take a quick look at all three applications:

Gmail

I Like:

1) The ads are unobtrusive. This is a huge advantage at the moment.

2) The Compose Mail window is the best of show. Lots of features, clean, uncluttered layout.

3) The Gmail Manager extension for Firefox makes it very easy to manage multiple Gmail accounts. A big advantage if you use multiple email addresses.

I Don’t Like:

1) No folders: I am still a folder guy when it comes to email storage.

2) If you’re used to Outlook, it’s a little hard to navigate.

3) Web Clips should be in addition to, not in lieu of, full RSS features.

Windows Live Mail

I Like:

1) If you use IE, the layout, look and feel are very similar to Outlook.

2) The multiple sort options in you inbox (by date, from, subject and size).

3) Great integration of email, calendar and contacts.

I Don’t Like:

1) Many features don’t work with Firefox. The Live Mail team is working on this and I suspect it will be a temporary problem.

2) I couldn’t figure out how to import calendar and contacts from Outlook. Hopefully this is coming. If I could synch between my home and office computers using Live Mail, that would be a huge advantage.

3) Needs RSS features.

Yahoo Mail

I Like:

1) It seems very well designed in general. The slight leader over Live Mail at the moment.

2) The calendar view and features are great.

3) RSS implementation is well done. I’ll never read the majority of my feeds in an email application (for these reasons), but some RSS feeds (like newspaper headlines, etc.) are perfect for reading in an email application.

I Don’t Like:

1) It crashes sometimes when I access it with Firefox.

2) Bad ad implementation- a great big ad at the top right. Again, use unobtrusive text ads.

3) I don’t like the contacts view nearly as much as I like the view in Outlook. Give us some display options here.

Conclusions

I have moved my RSS feed reading almost exclusively online. But because my primary email address is not a Gmail, Live Mail or Yahoo address, I still read most of my mail offline, via Outlook. Yahoo lets you retrieve your other email, which is handy if you want to access your email via someone else’s computer. But if you have your computer, it’s always going to be easier just to access your other email directly, via Outlook, etc.

All three applications have great features working in their favor. All three are still in beta, so the story isn’t over. But as of today, if I had to pick one to use as my primary email application, it would probably be Yahoo, because of the RSS implementation and the ability to access my primary email if I need to. If Live Mail gets Firefox friendly and adds RSS capability and POP mail retrieval, its Outlook-like features will give it the edge.

My prediction: Yahoo is ahead at the moment, but Live Mail will catch up. Gmail will be everyone’s “second” email address for a while until Google capitulates and makes a more traditional inbox structure an option.

Long term, all three will have significant market share, which is a win for the consumer.

I was planning to write a Tech Tips for Tweeners piece on spam, including when to try the “opt out” approach, but Ed Bott just did an excellent piece on it.

One thing I would add: with practice, you can tell which opt out links are more likely legitimate and which ones are totally bogus. As a general rule, an opt out link that merely sends an email to a free email address (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) is totally bogus and, as Ed says, will get you nowhere. A form at some offshore web site will likely not reduce your spam and may increase it. A form at a .com web site, and particularly one that seems, upon a review of the web site, to be a legitimate mailing list server is the best (but not guaranteed) bet.

One of the head IT guys at my firm did an experiment. He tried to opt out of every piece of spam he received over an extended period of time. The result: he says he got less and less spam over time. The “never reply to spammers” approach should be canned in favor of the “judiciously respond to spammers” approach.

One final tip. The best thing to happen to spam prevention in a long time is the new version of Outlook (Outlook 2003). It has a very effective spam filter that will eliminate a lot of spam. Be sure to keep the spam filter updated, either automatically via Windows Update or via the Help/Check for Updates menu. There is a new service pack update that adds additional spam protection.

And as Ed reminds us: never, ever, ever buy anything from a spammer.

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