[thelist] HTML EMail templates

[Green, Janet]

>>>I wrote a lil something up about this a year or so ago, and although it
deals mainly with javascript embeded emails and my particular disdain
for all things Winer, you might be able to get some ideas and good links
out of it. Make sure to read aardvarks comments on the end of it too..<<<

With all due respect to djc (thanks for taking the time to write an evolt
article!!) the best arguments were posted as response/comments to that
article by aardvark. Here they are: 

<snip from aardvark>
1. What if your mail reader doesn't support it?  
2. Some mail forwarders will choke on it if it isn't sent as 7-bit ASCII,
which I have seen happen. 
3. If the email references images, my Dial-Up Networking tries to dial-up
because I read most email off-line. 
4. The emails are always at least twice the size of an ASCII equivalent. It
has to include the plain text, and the text with markup. 
5. In Outlook the damn mail reader takes forever to render the page, which
is usually poorly designed color wheel crap. 
6. The security issues alone result in my sending most HTML email to the
trash without even opening it. If it was important, I'll get a phone call.
Besides, why would I want some script kiddie to have direct access to my OS
because some "developer" thought it would be keen to enable it? 
<end snip>

Aardvark, or anyone really, could you outline briefly what some of the
security issues *are* with this type of thing? For those of us unfamiliar
with the lingo, how does an html-based email provide direct access to your
OS? And to whom? 

 
Seems to me that any or all of these situations will apply to a good
percentage of your marketing department's audience (particularly the
complaints about Outlook, one of those pervasive Microsoft products, and
particularly anything implying a possible security problem). Obviously, this
would render their "fancy emails" either useless, unreadable, or annoying.
Good reasons all not to do it!! :) 

Janet