We got email
Louis Halpern's article, You've got email: are you using it? (Online November 30) misses out one element that I come across every day working in the internal comms side for a large company.

Emails take up a lot of the bandwidth and storage space of hard drives. By sticking to plain text format emails, you can reduce the amount of bytes needed to send and store the message - thus minimising the cost of maintaining email systems and download times especially for people accessing via a modem.

Including graphics and logos, and using the other features available in packages such as Outlook, as suggested by the author, and presumably also Edesigns.co.uk, greatly increases the space and bandwidth required.

This also eliminates people who use text-only email.
Name and address supplied.

I dread the day when every email comes with a company logo, as if there were not enough of the wretched things infecting public space already. More HTML, more attachments, more time to download emails - and more nooks for viruses to hide in.
David Harris,
Wheatley, Oxon

Halpern and Edesign are quite wrong to suggest that using branded emails would demonstrate professionalism in communications.

Their insight is a description of a potentially virulent development of e-junk mail. In fact the beauty of real email communication is the relief at not having to create a "professional" logo-dominated letter.

Professional communications are judged on content not on design. Our emails are not indistinguishable because they have no logo. That is sheer advertising hype!
Anthony Hoskyns
hoskyns@btinternet.com

Despite reading like a bit of advertorial, Louis Halpern (CEO of the only company mentioned in the article) makes some very useful points about how to approach writing business emails.

He moves on to discuss how to "brand" email but forgoes the analysis and precise recommendations of the earlier part of the article.

"Your logo says a lot about your business" is the only insight presented about email branding. Considering that the discussion about branding in the real world moved on from logos almost 20 years ago this appears banal.

Moreover, inserting a logo into an email requires using non-ASCII formats, which could result in recipients receiving a screenful of HTML - not very brand-friendly. If your intended recipients are on a dialup connection then opening such an email may force their modem to make an unrequested phone call.

Better that clients learn about potential recipients and brief their designers to apply their brand accordingly. If this requires using ASCII-formatted email then so be it.
Nico Macdonald ,
London WC2

No sale
Do all of your correspondents have shares in Tesco? We tried Tesco shopping and were very disappointed. It took over two hours to choose our shopping from the typed list.

When we placed our order we had to wait two days for a delivery slot. When the order arrived 16 items were missing, many of them needed for that night's meal.

You cannot beat choosing your own produce. The time taken to place our order over the internet was the same as going to the supermarket.

We have tried Sainsbury's with just a fraction more success.
Sandra Worden
thewordens@ic24.net

System wars
Is the Feedback column really the best place for platform and OS sniping? (Alun Griffiths, Online, November 30).

The views expressed by such snipers usually amount to little more than this: "I know this system really well - it's great; I know that one not at all - it sucks."

The truth is that Apple excels in hype, and Microsoft excels in marketing, but in reality, neither product is nearly as good as it should be. I have hopes for Mac OS X, which I understand will be Apple's first fully-featured modern operating system.

Then again, I've believed Apple's hype before...
Huw Thomas
hthomas@cix.co.uk

Thanks to Alun Griffiths for providing such a good example of the stunning ignorance of Mac users. Of course you can drag and drop files or folders around anywhere you want in Windows.

In fact, Windows offers greater flexibility, especially with right mouse click functionality and in open and save dialogue boxes, than with the overrated and overpriced Mac system.
D Hill,
London W12

Now I know why Mac users are sceptical about Linux. Like Alun Griffiths, I have an iMac. It runs a full RDBMS, web server, software development tools, graphics packages, email server, network file server and is an internet gateway allowing it and a W98 box to connect together over a single dialup line.

But I haven't come across anything that allows me to drag and drop files around anywhere I want.

Thanks, Alun, for reminding what an excellent system Linux really is.
Julian Rawcliffe
julian.rawcliffe@ntlworld.com

In reply to Alun Griffiths, it should be fairly evident that "D:\data" is the name of a directory (or folder if you prefer) that someone might reasonably create, in this case on a logical drive "D".

Logical drives are quite a useful feature once you get used to taking advantage of them, and as a result are increasingly less supported by Microsoft.

It certainly is possible to set up hierarchies of directories as you like on a PC, but with each new release of Windows it appears more and more that Microsoft wishes to bully or nanny users away from making sensible choices.

Having just moved to Windows 98 I find myself tearing my hair out at the operating system's insistence on trying to force files into places with twee names like My Little Documents and My Little Computer.

I haven't seen My Little Pony yet but I'm sure it's there.
Roger Musson Edinburgh