No, I haven’t forgotten about this site. I’ve been struggling for inspiration that wasn’t something I try to avoid posting about.So I start off this latest return with a rant.We use Microsoft Outlook as the e-mail client where I work. It’s been the standard for years, and folks have grown accustomed to being able to format text and have pretty pictures in their signatures and such.Now a few months ago our IT security folks recognized the bazillions of security threats as well as the fact that when it comes to protecting our network, our biggest security threat is the blatent laziness and stupidity of our users. As a result the put forth a mandatory security policy - All e-mail sent or received will be in plain text and not HTML or rich text. Any formating you make in the message will be blocked when the message is sent, messages from outside the organization have their formatting stripped off. It’s an automatic thing so users don’t have a choice in the matter. The whole idea is to prevent some malicious code from firing in an e-mail when they view it.Users being users have of course figured out a way around this. They quickly realized that even though their messages aren’t displayed in HTML or rich text, all that they needed to do is click on a spot in the header, and poof all the formatting would return.This has led to folks going back to the old way of changing fonts and adding colors in their e-mail and then adding the phrase View In HTML to tell their recipients how to view all the bold fonts and the like. Of course it’s so over used that it’s a joke. Folks make one word bold or three words italic and they want us to view their message in HTML, or they decide that they want their message in Arial instead of the Times New Roman font that plain text uses. My favorite, when people don’t do anything to their message - yet still tell you to View in HTML.
