I can't believe I'm doing this. But I still think it's the best solution. Consider the problem: a service company, client of yours, wants to send a newsletter to a list of several hundreds customer email addresses. Neither the sender nor the receiver is a computer geek and therefore would not accept some plain text message. (by the way -- I'm a fervent evangelist of effective email; pure text, nicely flowed, correctly quoted replies. I was sending the smallest emails at the last company where I worked; my messages were usually under 1 KB while most of colleagues would eat twice as much just for their html signature .. eurk) The receiver shall not have to launch an external application to view some attached documents. Almost half of the list are hotmail addresses. You see me coming? HTML mail is the way to go. Simple and obvious question: how do you send HTMl mail? Neither my main MUA (Mail.app under OS X) nor the one I'm contributing to (GNUMail.app under OS X and Linux) has this feature. In front of such problem, I always rely on the Swiss knife of scripting: Perl. Quick reading of rfc 2854 and the solution becomes so simple :

#!/usr/bin/perl

open(SENDMAIL, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -t -odq")
  || die "Can't fork for sendmail: $!\n";
print SENDMAIL <<"EOF";
From: My client <donotreply\@host>
To: <user\@host>
Subject: Newsletter - March 2004
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1    

<!-- .. some valid HTML .. -->

EOF
close(SENDMAIL)
  || warn "sendmail didn't close nicely";

Loop over a list of emails and convince yourself you're not spaming ..

15. Never fear mistakes.
14. There are no dumb questions.
13. Serendipity is your friend.
12. Know yourself.
11. Know your customer - LISTEN.
10. Know your competition.
09. Vision is easy. Execution is hard.
08. Focus, focus, focus!
07. Get a great team.
06. Dont forget your friends.
05. Understand your business model.
04. Never ask someone to do something you wouldn't do yourself.
03. Do Good.
02. Do it because you love it.
01. Dream. You can change the world.

-- David Sifry

If you don't know what you are willing to die for, your spirit is already dead. -- Martin Luther King