I don't see what is so awful about the UI in Outlook. I have numerous issues
of varying degrees of severity with Outlook but in general the UI is quite
nice I think, it is very usable. Yes this email is composed by Outlook and
there are third party tools to get around the quoting/reply differences
between what some people like vs what others like (search for "quotefix"). 

I also don't see what is so bad about HTML mail in principal. Perhaps
various composers/implementations would be better but the principal I think
is very useful and effective and has made a lot of communication much easier
(for good or ill) for more people using the internet. Using HTML email is a
lot easier for people to communicate than plain. People are not interested
in

While I am a fan of flexible power of doing things low level (CLI vs fancy
GUI stuff) email has evolved into a mainstream staple of internet
communication and as such means popular vote wins which is the fancy email
route. Everyone else who is appalled or refuses to accept this is a dying
breed and will live on in many niches but will never be able overcome this
"limitation" the rest of the world does not have with acceptance. Ranting
and raving or even starting a serious movement will not likely ever amount
to anything significant with regards to general preferences of the people or
actual changes in the standardized use of email. In the last 5 or so years I
have come to accept this as I used to be very dedicated to idea of keeping
HTML out of email by default but saw it as futile to try and say people into
using a less effective means of communication just because it was simpler
and would allow me to continue to use either ancient clients or extremely
basic mail clients often based on ancient mail clients.

I have mixed feelings about the reply, quoting, top/bottom posting, etc
debate. In general I am not strongly motivated to care too much to fight for
one or another particular point of view. I use various email clients and
usually just accept what the default behavior of the client I am using at
the time if it is not adjustable. I don't consider this a serious factor to
consider whether or not to use any particular mail client.

To get back to the subjet of the OP....
I think there will be a place for a variety of methods of running computers
for a long time to come and that perhaps eventually there will be a de facto
winner but even that will eventually fork out into other variations perhaps
coming back to older concepts yet again or else maybe we all get network
jacks installed into our brains and we interface directly with other
resources of the globalnet like a mix of skynet, the matrix, ghost in the
shell and other cyber-ish type stories. It is an interesting philosophical
and theoretical debate as to what is best and why though marketing will
likely unevenly skew peoples ideals.

-----Original Message-----
From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org
[mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org] On Behalf Of Carl Wilhelm
Soderstrom
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2010 9:15 AM
To: TCLUG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [tclug-list] Will Google rule with ChromeOS/Android?

I'm upset at them for that; but also for the way they destroyed e-mail
netiquette by encouraging top-posting, not quoting correctly, and HTML mail.
Not to mention how Outlook is such an adminstrative nightmare and has an
*awful* UI; but everyone accepts it as normal because it's so common.