On Sun, 12 Feb 2006 18:22:20 GMT, "Joseph Meehan"
wrote:

| Is it because they want it to be easy to spot their SPAM?
|
| --
| Joseph Meehan

Many, perhaps most, email and newsgroup postings have limited
typographic options -- a single font in a fixed size, no italic, no
boldface. The sender has no control over the end result. Spammers want
to grab attention, and think that using all caps is a way to emphasize
the message.

In my second career as a print graphics designer, I found that most of
my clients who did not have a graphics background liked heavy,
sans-serif typefaces and wanted to use at least six different fonts,
lots of type sizes, plenty of gratuitous italics, and ... you guessed
it ... lots of all-cap headlines and subheads. "For emphasis," they
said.

They ended up emphasizing everything, so the effect was to emphasize
nothing. And of course using all caps often makes headlines, or even a
single word, harder to read. Books and newspapers are not printed in
all caps for this reason.

Part of my job was to dissuade clients from doing this and create
instead an attractive, easy to read design.