On an E-Mail Frustration

I sold some stock a few days ago. Today, my brokerage sent me an e-mail presumably confirming that the transaction went through. I say “presumably” because this is the message I received:

This is a graphic email message. If you are reading this message then your email program does not support HTML format. We recommend upgrading the program you use to read your email.

My e-mail client is The Bat, and I’ve been using the program for years. It does handle HTML-f0rmatted e-mails, but I don’t want to be bothered with them so I have the program configured to present HTML e-mails as plain text. HTML e-mails are one of the big reasons e-mail worms propogate–that, and the open barn door that passes for MS-Outlook’s security.

Unforunately in this case, flipping over to the HTML viewer was of no help at all. Apparently this was a graphics-heavy e-mail linking back to the brokerage’s webpage–The Bat won’t display those graphics at all. All I had to go by was the URLs in the e-mail’s source code, but those proved unhelpful.

So, I have no idea what my broker was trying to tell me. Lovely.

I do know the stock was sold, though. I look at the online account tells me that.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

One thought on “On an E-Mail Frustration

  1. 😀 I like the new website layout Allyn! Very neat! I tried to click the link for “About” though and it doesn’t do anything. How is your break from work going? Call or write sometime!

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