Suggestion to Apple: Animated GIF's in mail.

Question

[Note: I would prefer to not hear one response from an apple user stating "animated gifs are ugly I'm glad it doesn't work." I too hate them, but read on...]
I recently helped a family of PC users switch to a Pentium iMac. I do their tech support and this has made my life SO much easier
The wife loves sending stupid little animated gifs back and forth to her friends... it's not for us to judge if they're ugly or annoying, they like them. Period.
I am so ashamed to have to go to her when I return her computer today and say "I'm sorry, this awesome and capable computer I have set you up with is unable to play back simple Animated GIF's.
I trust in Apple... playing back an animated gif should NOT be a major security threat. Make it work. Of course I could switch her back to Thunderbird but then that breaks her Address Book as well.
--Dan Dawson
[Owner of three Mac's myself]
G5   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Answer 1

If her friends are using Outlook Express, then it should work. Here is an excerpt from:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-19275.html
a) Apple Mail can embed animated Gifs in Mime Format Mails, but it doesn't show them animated itself! This means if you send such a Mail to a user with e. g. Outlook Express, he will see the Gif with it's animation, although Apple Mail didn't show it!
b) Even more interesting is this: when a user with Outlook Express sends you an Mail with embeded animated Gif, Apple Mail also shows the animation! Why is this, you may ask? It's because Outlook Express sends the Mail as HTML with MIME Attachment and also does a URL "CID:" reference in the HTML code to the actual embeded animated Gif! Quite nifty!
--- End Quote ---
You can read the site for more information.
The other option is to just use MS-Entourage.
Entourage can synchronize with Apple's Address Book. And, it's naturally going to have support built-in for Microsoft's methods.
As for making suggestions to Apple, you'll get better results by making the request to Apple directly.
They don't comb this discussion forum for ideas. And, tend to ignore what we say here.
So, go to their actual feedback page, and submit your request there:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/
At least then you know someone at Apple will actually read it.
There's no guarantee that they'll implement your request. But, you'll have a better chance if you submit your requests there.
Like all requests, the more people that want it, the more likely it will be added. So, get all your friends to request the feature if you want it.
Obviously, if the request comes repeatedly from the same person, they'll probably grow tired of it, and quit reading your requests. But, if several distinctively different people ask for something, they are very likely to consider it.
Hope this helps.