Email Linking, and WebTV's Responsibility
In June 1997, WebTV's 1.2 upgrade introduced HTML to email. Almost immediately, WebTV users began to explore the creative possibilities, and HTML email and postings have come to be one of the most visible (and, often, audible) characteristics of WebTV users' communications.
It has been a lot of fun, but it is not problem-free. WebTV users posting on Usenet have discovered that most PC users frown on HTML usage in newsgroups which weren't specifically set up for binaries (pictures and audio). HTML also is unwelcome in many PC users' email, and either doesn't show at all, fills the email with extra gibberish code, and sometimes can even crash PC email clients. (I spent yesterday afternoon reinstalling my PC email client for just this reason.)
Bandwidth Theft
Actually, the real problem isn't so much the HTML itself, but the practice of calling in pictures and audio into email by reference from their locations on the Net. Since we don't have a storage place within the WebTV service where we can put the images and audio we want to call into our email, the only way to get them there is to put them as an IMG SRC=the_URL_where_it_is.
What this means is that, every time someone opens the email or post that contains the image, a connection is opened to the server where the image exists and calls it in to the email. This is why so many of the HTML posts and emails take soooo long to open. Sometimes, people have referenced several different servers for pictures and audio, and all of them have to answer and send their resources before the email or post can fully load.
What makes this worse is that, unless you are calling the images and audio from your own website, you're actually stealing someone else's bandwidth. Many web hosts charge as much as 10-cents per megabyte for bandwidth usage over the free allotment. If you put a 50K graphic in your email and make 20 newsgroup posts, and each one is read by only 20 people, you've used 20 Megabytes of bandwidth from the site where that graphic is stored.
If the owner of the site is paying for bandwidth overage, you have just cost this person (whom you may not even know) $2.00 in real cash. Quite a number of popular artists have had to shut down their sites when they've been presented with bills of hundreds of dollars due to bandwidth theft. One of those artists who had to shut down her site told us that she'd even received a number of angry letters claiming "you broke my email sig" or "you broke my homepage" from people who had been linking in her graphics without her permission. And, even if it's your own site and doesn't have a bandwidth allotment, your host may not be happy if a lot of traffic flows out because of linking.
WebTV's Responsibility
WebTV users, for the most part, are very nice people, and most would not consider hurting someone else just to have their own email the way they want.
The fault for this is not the users' -- they were given a neat tool and told how they could use it by WebTV, without ever being told of the implications of using it that way. Even worse, WebTV (or certainly Microsoft) could easily afford to provide an extra 100K or so of storage space within the WebTV service where each user could upload and store the audio-visual resources for their email. If these were stored within the service, there would be no theft of bandwidth from the outside, and HTML email and posts also would load quickly.
This isn't a new idea -- it has been suggested to WebTV numerous times. Over eighteen months ago, we suggested it and offered to provide some contents for such an archive. WebTV staff told us that it was something that they were considering. Over a year ago, Draac had the same discussion with them. "That's a great idea," he was told, but it went no further.
It's more than a "great idea" -- it's WebTV's responsibility. Net4TV Voice calls on WebTV to stop the theft of other people's bandwidth by providing an archive or personal storage where users can put the resources for HTML mail.
While they're at it, they also should offer to host the Transloader (or another transloader) so that WebTV users can move resources into their homepage directories. This is another thing that WebTV forgot and a third party is providing, but the usage has become so heavy that lots of WebTV users can't get on to use it.
We've covered this issue before, and there are links below to our articles that explain it. If you want to have HTML in your email but want to be a good Netizen, here are some of the things you can do:
Create your signature with the special HTML effects like font effects, gradients and transparency, but don't link in graphics or audio from the outside.
If you like, use the graphics and audio in the WebTV ROM cache for your sig
If you have a Plus, use the image and audio capture for pictures and audio (these don't pull from anywhere outside the WebTV service)
Transload the images and audio you want to use onto your own website, and call everything from your own space.
Please never use a RAM in your email with the autostart set to "True." These pull bandwidth continuously from their source the entire time they're open, and are the biggest theft of all. Not only a they big bandwidth hogs, but they also take a RealAudio stream from the server that hosts it, and streams are limited and are not cheap.
Want to help? Write to WebTV and insist that we need an archive for email resources. HTML in email is too much fun to go away, but if we don't insist that they take this action to stop the bandwidth theft, some day someone else will. Unfortunately, the easiest way would be to take the HTML away. Whether you like HTML or not, a lot of people do. Insisting that WebTV take their responsibility will help us keep it -- and be good Netizens at the same time!
