More than words
How it's done
The options
Can they work together?

Tired of text-only e-mail? At last, e-mail programs are making it possible to format messages. But do they work together? We do some testing.

More than words . . .

When you consider the richness of the Web and the varied formatting options available on desktop applications, such as the average word processor, it's rather odd that e-mail -- the most used component of the Net -- is stuck in the realm of the typewriter.

Plain text may be okay for a quick two-line message but when you rely upon e-mail as a primary source of communications, especially for business use, it just doesn't cut the mustard. We long ago left the realm of character-based DOS word processors, but at least some of these could underline or centre a heading, make one word bold or another italicised. With e-mail you get a choice between ugly CAPITALS and bracketing a crucial word or phrase with clumsy _underscores_. Hooray for 20th century technology!

You can change the font and size used to display messages in your e-mail program, but this doesn't do anything to the native formatting of the message itself. What's received at the other end of the line will appear in whatever font and size the recipient has chosen in their e-mail client.

How it's done

So how do you dress up your e-mail with the polished look of the '90s? There are several e-mail programs which support formatting in both sent and received messages.

The catch is that most of these programs format messages in very different ways. Some use the same HyperText Markup Language (HTML) which transformed the Web from a dry textual environment to a glamorous fun-house. Others use the Rich Text Format (RTF) language designed for transferring files between different word processing programs and platforms. (Both RTF and HTML work by applying tags containing formatting instructions for the recipient. Try writing a formatted note in WordPad or Word for Windows or any other word processor, then opening it in Windows Notepad and you'll see the maze of HTML-like tags which surround the text).

Subsequently, when a message formatted in one program is received by another the results can be anything but WYSIWYG!

The options

So, if you want to take your e-mail beyond words, which client is best?

You can enable HTML formatting by clicking the Mail menu, clicking Options and on the Send page selecting the HTML button under the heading 'Mail sending format'. The Plain Text option beneath HTML is the default setting because it's compatible with all e-mail software. Now when you create a new message in Internet Mail you'll notice a formatting toolbar between the subject line and the message window.

Netscape Mail 3.0 (supplied with Netscape Navigator 3.0) can read HTML messages but cannot apply HTML formatting to new messages. Netscape's new Messenger mail program, which was in beta testing at the time of writing, makes up for this by offering full HTML message composition. Users can not only format text but create numbered lists, add horizontal rules or GIF images, paint text with one of 48 colours, embed hyperlinked URLs and targets, even include Java applets! We also looked at a beta copy of Netscape's new Messenger client which offers full HTML formatting (available from Netscape's Web site at www.netscape.com).

The popular freeware e-mail client Eudora Lite 1.54 is ASCII-only, of course. Eudora Pro 3.0 offers a 'Styled Text' feature with buttons for bold and italic, font colours and size, plus paragraph justification. This can be read in the new Eudora Lite 3.0 but not the ASCII-only Eudora Pro 2.x or Lite 1.54 editions.

Both the e-mail module of Outlook 97 and the optional WordMail editor of the Windows 95 Inbox (available when Word 95 is installed) permit a degree of fancy formatting and save the document in the RTF (Rich Text Format), not HTML.

This isn't surprising: Microsoft invented the RTF specification. They consider e-mail just another multi-program multi-platform document, and RTF is certainly a more powerful format than HTML in this regard.

Can they work together?

The question, then, is how well do these e-mail programs work together? Can you at long last begin to polish your messages with rich formatting to get your point across, or will the recipient have to wade through a jumble of tags and thus find your e-mails more confusing than ever before?

We created a series of richly formatted messages in each of the above-mentioned e-mail clients, then dispatched them through the same ISP to all of the other clients. The results were interesting, to say the least.

The ASCII-only part works fine, rendering Outlook 97 compatible with all other e-mail programs, but for some reason we were unable to get the message to retain its Word formatting. Even when opened in Outlook or WordMail the best we could do was old-fashioned text, albeit with a bullet list.

When an HTML formatted message is received in a non-HTML client the text is converted to the nearest ASCII equivalent. (Outlook, for example, replaced the horizontal rule in our Messenger e-mail with a dash line and rendered the table into tab-separated lines.) The full HTML version of the message is received as a file attachment.

Conclusion. What's to make of all this? Well, until the industry agrees on HTML as an e-mail standard, and also agrees on how much of HTML to implement -- the subset of Internet Mail or the full package of Messenger -- we can only recommend Netscape Messenger or Microsoft Internet Mail for taking your e-mail beyond ASCII.

By David Flynn