Dear Sprint

Your service called "PictureMail" is entirely misleading. There is no picture in it. It's just this wacky stuff called HTML that has no business in email, with a bunch of img tags.

This makes using your phones for LiveJournal "moblogging" next to impossible, as getting at the ‘real' image is at least 3 links deep into the Sprint system. You could at least be partially friendly about it, and include a text/plain part to your message that contains a link to the full sized image, so we can pull it off your server. Heck, having -any- text/plain part would certainly be nice, considering you currently are screwed unless you like to use shitty MUAs.

I like your phone service. The rest of your package is really, really lame. You'd have to try pretty hard to make it worse.

Signed, A current customer that is rethinking his decision.

update: Livejournal has enough people using sprint (god knows I get enough personal mail about it) that I've sent a rather detailed description of how they could improve their offering, without drastically changing their backend. Lets see how ‘on the ball' their feedback area is. (I doubt I'll get a reply.) "Error: Comment may not exceed 1000 characters, please adjust and resubmit." AUghHGHg

update #2: booyeah. Got the name of a guy on the ‘inside' that sent me some dev docs. Apparently, they've started embedding XML into the text/html piece, with attributes pointing to the full sized image. Not as nice as normal MMS mail, but much better than screen scraping! Hooray.