Tag Archives: email

The Email Standards Project

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In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally behind.

This year, the Email Standards Project was founded to rally support for web standards in email clients.

The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. The project was formed out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients.

Our mission is to drive the use and support of web standards in email, working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for designers and readers, and we’d love your help.

Given Microsoft’s recent slide backwards on this front in Outlook 2007, the need for a group like this has never been higher. Let’s hope they’re able to get the kind of results the Web Standards Project eventually got.

Getting Things Done: One Paragraph Review

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Getting Things Done

David Allen, the “personal productivity guru” featured on the cover, brings us his guide to “the art of stress-free productivity.” It’s a quick read, and after thinking it over for a few days, I’ve come to the conclusion that people reading this book will fall into one of two camps. First, there will be the people who find it revolutionary, and then there will be the people who read the book and say “Well, duh.” If you’re the kind of person whose desk is always covered in piles of paper, and your email inbox is overflowing with unread emails, this is the book for you. I’ve asked Annie to read it, in the hope that she will get some use from it. Personally, I thought some of the suggestions bordered on ridiculous, but even if you find the book to be mostly common sense, I think you’ll get a few useful suggestions, so I still recommend it. (If this book were a college course, it would be a required 100 level, and half the students would hate it.)

Don't Use Juno

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You may have heard of juno, the free email and internet access provider. I first heard of them a few years ago, and until I had enough money for my own real email account, I used Juno. In addition to being free, it had the nice feature of dialing up via an 800 number, and only taking up the phone lines long enough to retrieve and send email. My dad was so happy with them that he hooked our entire family up with Juno so everyone had email accounts, and I recommended them to just about everyone I knew. My parents are still using Juno for their internet access.

Those days are over. With the release of Juno’s new service contract, the company has done something absolutely stunning. The contract has the usual stuff… privacy agreements, indemnity arrangements, etc. Nothing particularly unusual. The kicker comes in section 2.5, where they let you know that they may require the users of their free services to allow Juno to install software on their computers, which will probably come in the form of a screensaver, that the users cannot disable in any way. The software will display ads, and run a distributed computing program (like SETI@home).

Doesn’t sound too bad, you say? Check this out: “…you expressly permit and authorize Juno to initiate a telephone connection from your computer to Juno’s central computers… Juno agrees that it shall exercise such right only to the extent necessary, as determined in Juno’s sole discretion, to upload the results of completed computations to Juno in a timely fashion; and you agree that… you shall be responsible for any costs and expenses (including without limitation any applicable telephone charges) resulting from the foregoing.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Juno is requiring ALL of its users to agree to the possibility that Juno will use your phone lines whenever it feels like it. The only condition is that they promise to try to only do it when necessary. But they decide when it’s necessary, and if you don’t comply by leaving your computer on all the time, they reserve the right to terminate your service or limit your access.

I strongly urge anyone with a Juno account to switch to a different company’s service plan. Most ISPs and free internet email accounts have a plan that is comparable to Juno, and won’t require you to give up your rights to your computer.