Would This Be Obnoxious?

Feedburner, the folks who despite being in 'pre-alpha' deployment provide my RDF and XML feeds, have a new gimmick they call a Headline Animator. Basically, they encourage users to put the following into the signature of every email:

Won't work for PINE users like me, but we're a rare breed.

Question: would this be an obnoxious thing to put in emails? Generally I don't like my emails to flicker at me. So I'm leaning against it. But it is sort of tempting.

This entry was posted in Discourse.net. Bookmark the permalink.

13 Responses to Would This Be Obnoxious?

  1. Pat says:

    Yes, I think it would be quite annoying and obnoxious…but then I spent 2 years of my life making html e-mails for a living. I might be biased.

  2. Greg says:

    I quite agree with Pat, this would be a bad idea. Interesting on a webpage, but definitely not through emails. And I use pine quite a bit as well!

  3. Well, considering the dangers of HTML email, I wouldn’t want to encourage anyone to turn HTML on.

  4. Jon Moyer says:

    It would be dreadful for those who, for whatever reason, accept HTML in their emails.

    I’m not sure what benefit it would provide — who needs to duplicate their aggregator in email? Are you going to send me a personal email every day so I can keep up to date on recent blogifications?

  5. David Knopf says:

    Horribly, horribly obnoxious. Please, please don’t.

  6. Bicyclemark says:

    Yeah… I think its ok for bulletin board posts and other html situations, but probably not email.

    Wow… pine.. old school.

  7. Yes, it would be obnoxious, although for me personally only in the waste of downloading time for the messsage when I’m on the road, since I never read e-mail as HTML. (And given that virtually all viruses are spread by HTML-mail opened in MS-Outlook, and thus in effext “Outlook viruses” rather than “e-mail viruses”, it’s a mystery to me why anyone who knows they have a choice uses Outlook or opens e-mail as HTML.)

  8. apav says:

    Horribly obnoxious

  9. Nasi Lemak says:

    mutt (www.mutt.org) is pine-esque, but an order of magnitude better (it comes with a setup to mimic either elm or pine, and you can tinker with it at will).

  10. matt shobe says:

    A few of us at FeedBurner remember Pine quite fondly. Well, at least I do — it was the de facto email client at University of Washington in the mid-90s when I attended. No surprise there, considering that it rolled off of an assembly line right on campus somewhere.

    Obviously not everyone’s a big fan of HTML email, and that’s cool with us. We’re looking at other ways to expose this capability, including providing much more customization of its display properties. If you like the idea but maybe not the current implementation, and feel like sharing your suggestions with us, please do: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/feedback

    Thanks for starting the discussion (and for using FeedBurner), Michael!

  11. Aaron Swartz says:

    I wouldn’t mind except it’s:

    1. HTML
    2. Animatedly obnoxious
    3. Ugly

  12. Steven Bobker says:

    Do what you want. It’s your email. But I’d never see any of it. My filkters looks for things milder than that and keep them far from my tender eyes. I doubt I’m alone. Animated email is easy to filter and I’d bet a lot of us do it.

  13. Jean says:

    technocute it isn’t

Comments are closed.