On 13/04/2012 09:46, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In ,
wrote:
We are no longer living in the dark ages.
There are very few people using shared 300 baud modems these days.
Or computers that can't handle some simple mark up languages.

'We' may not be - but other parts of the world still are.
Those who just really must have pretty fonts in all different colours -
laid over some picture or other - can always use a forum where others with
the same likes go. But leave this medium as it is and was meant to be -
just plain text, and nothing else.

--
*The average person falls asleep in seven minutes *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Is that why you waste bandwidth on your sig?

Very good Dennis. First time you've ever made me smile - intentionally.

Adding html tags doesn't add much more and its up to the reader whether
it displays backgrounds, etc.

You seem as usual to have missed the point. Make it HTML, and most who
prefer this will bloat it out with all the bells and whistles it allows.
You'd know this if you lived on earth.

As a recent good example of this, one of our clients recently got a
design firm to redo all their company brochures, new web site etc - the
full works. Part of that included them generating new email signatures
to be used across the organisation. Anyway they ran into difficulties on
a couple of points, the first was they realised it was not a trivial
matter to punt out 50 HTML sigs to a bunch of otherwise smart enough
people who have on average IT competency around carpet underlay level,
expect them to edit to include their details etc, and then install them
in thunderbird. The second was that one of the images (a thumbnail of
the monthly magazine cover) was not getting included in the email on
receipt for some reason.

So we started investigating. We had already met and fixed the first
problem in the past with a bespoke thunderbird add on that prompted them
for their contact details etc, and populated the template sig and
installed it for them. The second one however was quite revealing....

The "thumbnail" they were including was not a thumbnail at all, but a
full sized image over 1024px on the long side that there were scaling to
fit the 78 pixel space in the HTML image tag of the footer! Hence they
were expecting TB to encode the full size image and send it in the email
(fortunately it obviously has a sanity check built in to limit the size
of image it will include in a signature file). The resulting 150K image
plus the other images that they had included meant that had it of
worked, each email footer would have been around 250K. By the time they
had forwarded a message to others around the office a few times each
mail would be romping into the 1 meg plus territory, for a total
information content of "Did you see this?", followed by "Yup", and "ok".

We pointed this out to the design company, but they said they were
constrained by the image they had to pick up from the web site, since it
was only available in a fixed size and was automatically generated from
the magazine cover each month. (i.e. we draw pretty things, don't do
technical!)

So in the end we tweaked our sig tool to cope with the new format, and
setup a scheduled process on one of our servers to grab the images each
night from their server, scale and optimise them, and cache them ready
for use later in place where the sig tool could get them. It reduced the
problem image from 150K by itself to 2.6K, and the whole footer to a
more manageable 35K.


--
Cheers,

John.

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