This month -- HTML mail.

For the most part, email that we receive is from other people on the GECDSB server. It's straight forward text and FirstClass does a nice job of displaying the text and the sophisticated user may change fonts or colours to doctor the document a bit.

However, there may come a time when you receive mail from an external source that isn't straight forward text. Many mailers will send the message as HTML or XML and so you're on your own to interpret it. The FirstClass client is getting better at interpreting things but it isn't 100% foolproof yet.

Below is a picture of an email message that I receive as a result of a subscription to a Macromedia Flash developers newsfeed.

It's not bad and you can sort of make out what the intended message is. However, there are broken images and big black blotches and some misformed alignment. What to do?

Well, in addition to viewing your messages with the FirstClass client, don't forget that you can also log in with the web interface. That way, you're seeing your FirstClass account in a web browser. I a lot of cases, this tends to do a better job of rendering these types of pages.

There still may be problems with graphic images but I'm sure that will improve over time.

So, file this away in your bag of tricks and it just might help you decipher some of those scrambled looking messages! As with all messages, make sure that you know who the message is from before you do this. The odd message still manages to squeak through our filter and you don't want some inappropriate code doing things to your computer without your permission.

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