Having just been assaulted by innocents using Incredimail i feel compelled to rant about it for all to see, in the hope that others will be spared from its horrors.

Giving it to senior citz to use as their email client, is possibly the digital equivalent of handing out free spray paint to adolescents.

Seriously, email is about text! As if hotmail and yahoomail dont fill emails with enough rubbish, unsuspecting individuals can now have ads involuntarily concatenated to their outbound emails seemingly without respect for creed, country or person.

So here i am, being a nice netizen. I use thunderbird and bongs email servers are extremely strict on email. We run spamassassin with a pile of custom rules, as well as clamav keeping a lot (most) virii at bay, i also went the extra mile by excluding chinese, japanese, russian encoded emails all together. Its a very top effort i think and scanning the logs we are turning away *heaps of emails* - probably more emails are turned away than recieved. Did i mention we also reject executable files, screen savers, javascript and office docs? zip or rar people!

Anyway so im happily being a goot netizen, enjoying my many and varied email list plus personal emails etc. then suddenly i am recieving emails that take longer to recieve than their 50 or so counterparts (i check email in batches kinda, like on the run with webmail, and then clear it out into thunderbird at the end of the day). Not to mention the irritation, i am then visually assaulted by something which has more in common with macdonalds placemats then it does with email. The sad thing is... its not spam! its someone email and worse of all, they expect me to take the email seriously and resent by '@bong.com.au' address. Its unfortunate that circumstances compell me to continue contact in this way, but at the same time have forced me to look at ways to have our MTA (exim, love it) strip html content from messages.

You dont sell knives and spray paint to children because they are irresponsible, so for the same reason dont *give* crappy email (or email at all) to senior citizens!