The (Calendar Invite) Attachment Anti-pattern
Life with a better Outlook
People frequently send me ‘invites’ with attached Internet Calendaring and Scheduling (.ics) files. This is problematic, as I don’t use (fat client) Outlook, and web/mobile Outlook might be able to open those files (sometimes), but can’t do anything useful with them[1].
To make matters worse, it’s pretty common for the ‘invite’ to say nothing about when the event is happening. It’s a secret. Open the .ics attachment and all will be revealed.
Still using letterhead
This as a subset of a larger problem where people wrap a few lines of text that could so easily just go into an email into a PDF, Word doc, Excel spreadsheet or whatever; which completely fails the keep it simple, stupid (KISS) test. It’s also an accessibility issue, and a potential security issue – making people open other apps (that they may not have, or might have difficulty using) so that those apps can read attachments that could be carrying any manner of malware.
My kids’ school is one of the worst perpetrators. They’ll happily send a PDF that has a single line of content. Often something completely mundane like, ‘please log onto section blah of the parent portal (for the actual info we’re trying to convey)’.
I suspect that in their case (and many others) it’s a failure to adapt to ‘digital’. They may crow about kids using iPads in their classes[2], but I suspect that their approval workflow is much the same as when everything went to the headmaster’s secretary to be manually typed onto school letterhead.
Email overload is a modern disease, and much of the ‘digital’ conversation these days goes on about shinny new tools that are supposed to eliminate email (and it seems any free RAM you might have had on whatever you’re using). But attachments make overload worse rather than better, as they introduce more friction into reading email.
You can help by…
If you’re asking somebody to come along to an event, for sure add an .ics file in case it might be useful. But make sure to say (in the subject line) when it’s happening, so it’s not obligatory to open that attachment.
More generally a good rule of thumb might be that anything that fits onto a page or less shouldn’t be an attachment – just put the text into the body of the email. Hooray – you’re now a digital native.
Notes
[1] Let’s not go down the rabbit hole of incompatibility between the worlds of Microsoft, Google and Apple when it comes to invites.
[2] The iPad fad was in fact short lived, and they soon switched (back) to laptops.
Filed under: technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: attachments, calendar, ICS, invite, Outlook, text
Subscribe
Search
Raspberry Pi Downloads
Top Posts
- 5 6 7 Rs of Cloud Migration
- Getting more from a British Gas UP2 Timer
- Howto: secure your DNS with a Raspberry Pi, Unbound and Cloudflare 1.1.1.1
- Howto - Factory Reset iLO 4 on HP Microserver Gen8
- Making an image file from an SD card on Windows
- Replacing Active Directory DNS with BIND on OpenWRT
- Howto stunnel from HTTPS to HTTPS
- Retro Computing - RC2014
- Multiple single pages in Hugo
- So you want me to approve your open source project
-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Chris Swan on ZeroSSL API – The missin… Anonymous coward on ZeroSSL API – The missin… Jaqi M. on Howto – fix lip sync on… Kim Chick on Getting more from a British Ga… Nathan Howard on January 2021 Pinboard.in bookmarks
- Python books free to read online or download
- Docker without Docker · Fly
- Taylor Swift and licensing
- Compute Module 4 NAS With Custom Carrier Board
- Waterfall 2006 - International Conference on Sequential Development
- Python requests - print entire http request (raw)?
- How to Set and Get Environment Variables in Python
- Check if key exists and iterate the JSON array using Python
- Projects & Committees Archive - OASIS Open
- Nobody Cares About the Operating System Anymore
Twitter Updates
- @Mrs_XR Indeed. Says something about where they purloined the data. 7 hours ago
- RT @dinahturner: Enjoyed #BVSSH today Here’s a little bit of learning to think about and pass on about flow efficiency 😊 #lean #agile #kan… 9 hours ago
- I should take a month away from #BeatSaber more often if it means a new level drops for my return :) OST4 has quit… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 10 hours ago
- @zef Where unintended interaction between A and B make them both fail. Not that I'm the slightest bit interested a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 10 hours ago
- Seems @HelloFreshUK think we’re stupid. Both of these hit the doormat this morning, one offering 60% off for me, bu… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 11 hours ago
Blogroll
- 451 CAOS Theory
- Adam Bosworth’s Weblog
- Andrew McAfee
- Behavioural Investing
- CapitalSCF
- Carpe Visum
- causticTech
- Charles Stross
- confused of calcutta
- Cory Doctorow
- Craig Murray
- Dan Creswell’s Weblog
- Dark Reading
- Dilbert Blog
- DJW
- Doc Searls
- Don Box’s Spoutlet
- Dopplr
- Eben Moglen
- Enhyper
- Financial Cryptography
- Fred Destin
- Freedom to Tinker
- Graham Glass, etc.
- Greg Matter
- Hugh Grant
- Internet Alchemy
- Invisible Things
- James Strachan’s Weblog
- John Merrells
- Jon Udel
- Justice League
- Kim Cameron
- Lambda the Ultimate – Programming Languages Weblog
- Light Blue Touchpaper
- Loosely Coupled weblog
- Luke Hutteman’s Weblog
- Marc Andreeson
- Nick Selby
- ongoing
- Otaku, Cedric’s weblog
- Park Paradigm
- Paul Graham
- Phil Becker
- Pi4Tech
- PJKtech
- Radovan Janecek: Nothing Impersonal
- rants
- Richard Monson-Haefel
- SAAS
- Schneier on Security
- Service Oriented Enterprise
- Simon Phipps’s Blog
- techno.blog(“Dion”)
- The BileBlog
- THE GRID BLOG
- Tim Oren’s Due Diligence
- timbl’s blog
- virtualization.info
- WebMink
- WebServices.org
- XKCD
Categories
No Responses Yet to “The (Calendar Invite) Attachment Anti-pattern”