Primitive Email or leaving the Mid(em)ail ages

I use character style attributes (e.g., boldface, italic, underline, size) and other RTF nicities, (e.g.,text color, highlight colors, etc. ) extensively.

I recently responded to a friend’s email by interspersing my comments within the text I’d received from her. (I distinguished my responses from her original text by boldfacing them and went on from there.) As I formatted I noticed immediately that my formats were not being displayed. No problem, I instructed Outlook to format my reply as “html”, problem solved.

Today I received a continuation of that conversation and including all the material we’d exchanged. I’d expected it to contain my formatted text and was very surprised to find that everything I’d included in the last communication had been changed into CAPITAL LETTERS.

Q1) Was the email my friend got from me formatted in the way I’d intended? Would she have been able to see it as formatted text or had my text been ‘TRANSLATED’ before she opened it?

I brought the problem to her attention by telling her what I believed had happened and instructing her to change her email to a mode where it displayed "as html" (i.e., in full RTF splendor)—a change, I emphasized, that should be a simple matter. She responded by saying that for the last god-knows-how-long (30+ years?) she has been sending/receiving email using the email (engine) provided to her by her isp/email-provider and displayed in that provider's email app/website. She said: “I get my emails directly from webmail.xxxxx.com/? . . . , and can't control bold, colors, etc.”

Apparently, she never knew there was any other way of experiencing email!

Q2) I guess these primitive forms of email are still in existence. Are they widely used? Should there be a way one can easily change the way email is displayed or request the provider do the change (and expect not to be charged for the service)?

I realize there’s a simple solution to this problem: She could just establish a Gmail address and view It through gmail.com. But I’m afraid this would come to naught.

I could also establish a gmail account for her and ask her to try it out, but, again, what with getting used to a new email address; from a new provider; using gmail.com; and having to contend with all the verification procedures (2-step verification; Two-Factor Authentication, security questions, privacy settings, yada, yada…) Google puts one through; I feel fairly certain this effort on my part would totally alienate her.

Q3) Realistically speaking, how can she retain her isp, continue to use her isp’s email address and email website, and experience email in full RTF/html splendor?

Thanks

What I'm seeing in the questions is whether the E-Mail is trying to convey a message or displaying designing capabilities. If I want the design part to be important I create an HTML Web page and attach it to a simple E-Mail. Double-clicking the HTML file will open in any browser.

Or, you can always make a Word doc.

Can you please respond to the questions.
I see no reason that, given a palette, one should not use it.

jro11 said:

I see no reason that, given a palette, one should not use it.

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One can use whatever they want but with computing and communication the end result will always be what the recipient can work with.

Yeah they would have gotten your formats I’d guess. You could always ask them and attach a screenshot to see if that’s what they seen.

Different clients behave in different ways. I seem to recall Outlook has reply layout options.

Send yourself a formatted email, respond to it, respond to the response. See what the results are?

ISP Webmail/online mail interfaces can behave differently. If that’s what they’re using? Last 30 years? It’s obviously not Outlook, Hotmail or LiveMail Tell them to get with the times?
Especially if they’re reading mail online using something like Roundcube or some basic server interface mail client maybe?

antspants said:

Yeah they would have gotten your formats I’d guess. You could always ask them and attach a screenshot to see if that’s what they seen.

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First, thank you Ants for responding to my questions!!
I would do so but worry she's too old to know how to handle attachments. For one thing, she's having to manually correct errors in her text because her keyboard is so old it's missing some of its ("letters") keypads!
I'd prefer to know more about what is happening and possibly know more about how to solve the problem myself before asking her to put herself out. (I'd be happy to send her a new keyboard if that would help, but I'd first have to find out what kind of connector is on the end of its cord!)

antspants said:

ISP Webmail/online mail interfaces can behave differently. If that’s what they’re using? Last 30 years? It’s obviously not Outlook, Hotmail or LiveMail Tell them to get with the times?
Especially if they’re reading mail online using something like Roundcube or some basic server interface mail client maybe?

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Yeah...but again, the vagaries of age...
In some ways I'm no better. After spending a good bit of time unsuccessfully trying to connect an Orbi mesh router (and in the process noticing it was trying to affect my WiFi-related cell phone connection) I ended the process and was grateful to find out the phone successfully connected to the WiFi router it had been connected to previous.
This morning, while dealing with a billing dispute with a previous phone provider (that came up last night as I was perusing my email, on the phone), I discover I can no longer make, or receive, phone calls, and to further complicate things, can no longer get (verification) text messages!!
Email, web, Google Keep, What's App (yes!!), they all work. Just no phone or text and no idea how to address (a phone restart didn't help) this problem.
So asking an old friend to "get with the times" seems a bit unkind.

jro11 said:

So asking an old friend to "get with the times" seems a bit unkind.

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Sure.

jro11 said:

Realistically speaking, how can she retain her isp, continue to use her isp’s email address and email website, and experience email in full RTF/html splendor?

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How important is it. Is the formatting important to her or is it only important to you?

Nobody could answer the question of them receiving formatted rtf or anything else, without knowing what they are reading email through.

And… are you absolutely sure they can’t see the formatting?
As I said, some clients have reply settings. The original email after being replied to

> could
> simply
> look
> like
> this…

So the original email attached to their reply could look like the above formatting? How do you see your original email under their reply when they have replied to you?

antspants said:

How important is it. Is the formatting important to her or is it only important to you?

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Very important to me.
No telling how important to her.

antspants said:

Nobody could answer the question of them receiving formatted rtf or anything else, without knowing what they are reading email through.

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Of course. Though I remember the days I got email through--now what was that called?--a dialup modem.

antspants said:

are you absolutely sure they can’t see the formatting?

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No. I will send her a sample.

antspants said:

So the original email attached to their reply could look like the above formatting? How do you see your original email under their reply when they have replied to you?

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Like I said, it comes back IN ALL CAPS. (Which immediately told me that some sort of 'translator' had done some kind of obvious formatting that could only have been applied in text format--making all the letters UPPERCASE.

You could always type it out they way you like and take a screen shot and send her a picture of the text!

jro11 said:

I will send her a sample.

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I’m now totally confused. It’s probably going to take someone older (than us whippersnappers) to dig back into his neural archives to sort this out.

[This was her reply]

No idea what's going on. Probably start a new thread to unconfuse it.
I'm not techie.

On 2025-03-27 13:28, my-email-address@gmail.com wrote:

> Sorry, but this is important to me (PROBLEM _WITH_ BEING A VERY VISUAL
> PERSON.)
>
> THIS IS A SAMPLE OF WHAT I SENT YOU:
> [a screen shot appeared here]
> THIS IS WHAT I GOT BACK FROM YOU
> [a screen shot appeared here]
> Which did you see when you got my message?
>
> j
>

I have no idea what she really saw, whether the screen shots appeared or not (no, I’m not going to resend them as attachments).

1) I strongly assume the graphics were totally removed from the message (before she got the message); and lots of carriage returns and ‘>’s added.
2) odd though, only some of the text was capitalized.
3) The only element ‘normal’ to the communication was her 2-liner. No one had messed with those 16 words, 3 periods, and one carriage return.
4) Also odd is that the (3) dashes I sent were replaced by underbars. (odd, because a text program like Notepad has no problem with dashes).
5) Needless to say, was totally mutilated.
6) Also interesting, my email return address came through as an {www).activeLink.com
and
7) The line "Which did you see when you got my message?", a line of text only reformatted (by me) by increasing its size, two times, was not capitalized.

Any ideas??

Scannerman said:

You could always type it out they way you like and take a screen shot and send her a picture of the text!

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Looks like that's not possible.

Hey, I told you, formatting can be removed from the original message in a reply because it is no longer needed.
For a start, it’s not the original email, that is with her. There is no need for formatting in the original email “in a reply” This is a most likely scenario, if the persons email client is as old as Moses or the settings haven’t been tweaked.

And if they are using something that doesn’t support formatting (highly unlikely) and they are too old to learn (not that I believe in that concept)… Then it is what it is.

My opinion is that you’re stressing because you like to stress, you like complicated, it’s always painfully obvious, J-man
I’ll leave you with it.

antspants said:

Hey, I told you, formatting can be removed from the original message in a reply because it is no longer needed.

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Wrong. The email I sent (#14) may have been a reply, but everything that was in it, that I quoted in this post was original, as original as the first post in our conversation.

antspants said:

My opinion is that you’re stressing because you like to stress, you like complicated, it’s always painfully obvious,

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Maybe because I suffered in QA (quality assurance) for 8 years and expect better of current technology, no matter what the state of its users.
Maybe because I prefer to use all the resources technology can easily provide (I'm not talking Photoshop...) to send interesting, expressive, precise, and (yes, sometimes) entertaining, emails.
...and yes, I stress over things like that.