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April 05, 2007
ATTACHMENTS ARE EVIL! EVIL! AHH AHHH....
Every time I get an attachment for/on a press release, I start channeling Sam Kinison.
"OOOAHOAHHOOHH...why are you doing this? Haven'tyoueverheardofVirusesorspywareorPDAsorcrappynetworksOHAHAOAH!!!"
Why do people insist on .PDFs? or .DOC files??
Two big reasons why I hate them are as follows--
1) Bandwidth. I travel. Believe it or not, when people travel, they don't have fat pipes like they do at home or in the office. Hotel networks, be they wired or wireless, just freaking COLLAPSE when the techies come to town, because when everyone leaves the show floor at 5 PM, 75 percent of them run back to their hotel rooms to check e-mail... thereby dragging everything to a crawl.
I saw this happen at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston during a Fall VON a couple of years ago. It was the major event that moved me into getting an EVDO phone and data service from Sprint. (Well, that and a crappy Wi-Fi connection at the Imperial Palace during CES, but I digress).
Since I get tons of e-mail (57 before breakfast, Tuesday, Spring 2007 VON, no joke, most press releases), every attachment, every 300K to 1MB .PDF adds up. Even with the speeds I get from EVDO, it takes a while to download mail, so I curse every large attachment that comes through.
2) Viruses, spy-ware.
The security problems with MS Word .DOC files are, shall we say, well documented. Adobe Acrobat .PDF files have been used in at least one documented instance to carry a payload of spyware and it's one of the "flavors of the month" for mischief in the future.
You could add on a third "Why on here?"
3) Portable devices. Sure you CAN (with great difficulty) read a .PDF or .DOC file on some portable devices, but on every cell phone? On a Blackberry?
That's just from the client/receiver side -- i.e. the guy that's got to read it when/if it arrives.
Consider what sending all this stuff through a mass mailer might do to your network connection and/or hitting a flag on a third-party spam filter somewhere in the network.
Stick to plain text or HTML in the BODY of an e-mail message. Everyone can read it on most all devices and it arrives much faster when we're not jacked into the cable modem at home.
Posted by dmohney at April 5, 2007 02:32 PM