> HTML emails are mainly used for marketing - that is, emails you probably don't want to see in the first place. The few advantages they offer for end-users, such as links, inline images, and bold or italic text, aren't worth the trade-off.
Inline images are a huge, huge advantage, especially for internal business communications where an email may be the only real documentation of a problem and its solution. (Or at least the only documentation that can stand on its own -- the alternative is usually a PowerPoint deck with missing information that was only given in a one-time presentation.) Being able to add a graph or a table or a schematic or a photo is important for anyone who works with non-text data. I suspect some programmers may be unaware of how unusual it is to work entirely in text.
Maybe emails shouldn't be primary documentation. They were never designed for that, and shoehorning them into that role has ruined the entire experience.
For example, my workplace no longer allows forwarding or IMAP access because of this, so I'm forced to use the sh*tty Outlook web client, which wastes untold numbers of minutes each day waiting on the damn thing to load something. Just now it wouldn't let me open a PDF in a native client, because I guess Microsoft is so obsessed with locking us into their ecosystem. Instead I had to save it to disk first then go to the file manager to load it. (Yo, MSFT, this is why people hate you.)
Those things you mentioned are a-ok, but including a photo in the email signature really bugs me. There are times when I want to look for emails with an attachment, but often the company logo in the signature causes false hits.
What really bothers me is when someone copy and pastes something they've written in MS Word into their email and turning the email into HTML without even noticing. What's even worse is when people bump up the font size of the entire email body because they think since their email client has a small default font size it must be the same for everyone else, I've seen tech CTO's do this to, sometimes you wonder what the technical chops for a position like that really is.
I think it's significant that this is written in the passive voice. Because written this way it has the semblance of officialness, of generalness. Whereas writing it in the active voice would reveal that the people doing the preferring are just the people who made this website, and this preference is just that: a preference.
I love HTML emails, because I use italics basically all the time in my writing, and underscores _just don't offer the same experience_.
There is a standard text/enriched content type that enables only “text formatting” and not arbitrary HTML. But HTML rapidly took over email, and now I don’t know what clients even implement text/enriched anymore.
In normal text (i.e not Markdown), using /slashes/ can get the idea across more visually. I think I picked it up on Usenet where it was reasonably common.
Yeah I used to be a text fanatic and then started seeing the value in making things stand out in HTML. Lol, some co-workers just don't get things that aren't in bold or well-formed bullets. I rarely put in images, but when I do having them inlined is indeed valuable. I just wish we had a proper subset, though. Maybe markdown would have been way better if it was around and well known at the time.
"Because written this way it has the semblance of officialness, of generalness."
I agree with you. Moreover, there's very little chance of any agreement about this in the foreseeable future. Those who believe that plaintext is God's gift to emailers will never change their views. They've held these views for many decades, so there's precious little chance of them doing so anytime soon.
We've seen this all before in many other endeavors both technical and nontechnical. Those who wrote with quills and fountain pens said that writing would go to the dogs if ballpoint pens became commonplace.
Fortran programmers resisted going from upper to lowercase (even now, this modern browser editor has a hangover from that long gone era as it automatically converted 'Fortran' to uppercase as was the once custom). As a longtime Fortran programmer, I'd suggest that if decisions about the human-computer interface were left to my kind then we'd likely still be using uppercase ASCII and telex machine would still be fashionable although perhaps considerably faster.
As is usually the case, there's often some truth to the arguments and promoters of a cause buttress them up with historical usage or precedent so as to strengthen their case. Making their arguments sound credible is an essential part of convincing neophytes and potential converts that they're right.
I'll briefly go back to the fountain pen example for a moment as it's analogous to this case and it's simple and easy to understand. There's considerable evidence that when the ballpoint pen overtook nibbed pens a little after WWII that writing did in some ways go to the dogs but the ballpoint only shares part of the blame, things were much more complex than it alone.
I have some authority in saying that as I'm a regular user of fountain pens and I own quite a number of them. Moreover, my writing is much less sloppy with them than when I use ballpoints not to mention the fact that I actually prefer writing with a nib as it provide much better haptic feedback than do ballpoints. There's little argument about that and the evidence is easily demonstrated by examining the writing of current users of said pens.
That said, that's only part of the story. There are also other reasons for why writing deteriorated at that time but it's off topic so I won't go into specifics. However, the relevant point with this example is that the promulgators of nibbed pens only promote their benefit - that of better handwriting. What they omit and never tell you about are the many disadvantages that nibbed pens have: ink gets everywhere, they're messy and time consuming to fill even when using ink cartridges - and probably the worst of all: take a fountain pen on a plane trip and the reduced air pressure forces ink out and all over one's shirt pocket. Right, there couldn't be a worse place for that to happen. And it happens frequently (I know from experience).
Back to plaintext email, it's what its promoters do not tell you about that's the real problem. The list is long but there's little point detailing them all here except to say that two stand out. If images and tables cannot be included as inline information then either they're likely to be lost or misplaced and second, that having to encode and transmit them separately by other means is both time consuming and error prone even if done within the same email client.
Moreover, plaintext doesn't have the range of glyphs and or the means of displaying them so that the presentation of the message information is simple and easy for the average nontechnical user to understand.
Try sending math equations in plaintext and you'll quickly get the 'picture'. Yes, it can be done but it's also messy, time consuming and error prone.
Things that are noticeable about the promoters of plaintext: they're often programmers or those who are experienced in abbreviating messages, they talk in acronyms and understand complex concepts even though their presentation may be poor, and thus they've little interest in presentation for the sake of clarity.
Unfortunately, these attributes are so often what ordinary users lack and it's specifically why big companies such as Microsoft use HTML email. Making software easier is supposedly part of their plan even if they often screw these processes up during deployment.
Like you, I like HTML email, however I'm still critical of it for the reason that at this point in its development it still does not have sufficiently well developed formatting to do what I want to do. For instance, no email client is yet capable of inserting math equations into email with ease.
My philosophy about email is very simple: a user should be able to insert into a message any type of information that can be printed in a book or drawn or scribbled on paper by hand and it should be transmissible to the recipient without any loss of formatting. QED!
Right, we aren't there yet and this view is the antithesis of the plaintext philosophy. Nevertheless, that's what eventually will happen whether the plaintext-ers like it or not.
A final point: you'll note that plaintext-ers are always whingeing about users who cut-and-paste from word processors and web pages and that the info gets garbled in the process; well, they've a valid point.
However, this has nothing to do with the issue that email presentation and formatting should be as easy and as versatile as is possible. The fact that most email clients are woefully bad - in fact outright disgraceful - is a separate issue altogether.
Moreover, I'd suggest many mail clients would be in a much better state than they are at present if the plaintext-ers weren't sabotaging their development. After all, many of them have actually developed mail packages and they give little or no priority to HTML messages not to mention their fervent propaganda in favor of plaintext email.
__
Edit: this plaintext email story is not the only one to appear in the last day or so on HN about email content. The other, however, took a diametrically opposing view to this story as it discusses various ways of maintaining accurate CSS formatting in emails - now that's one hell of a jump from plaintext messages.
That story only demonstrates that the gap between the plaintext-ers and those who want advanced HTML formatting is as wide as ever. After reading it you'll likely realize that ultimately plaintext-ers will have very little chance of winning against strong commercial pressures that want better formatting within email.
The link below is to my comment and deals with many of the issues mentioned herein. Therein, I use Thunderbird to demonstrate some of the many problems with current email clients.
Incidentally, as that story was earlier I wouldn't be a bt surprised if this plaintext one was posted as a countermeasure to the former.
Some companies have given up on plain text completely. I'm getting these kind of messages now:
We have tried to send you this email as HTML (pictures and words) but it wasn't possible. In order for you to see what we had hoped to show you please click here to view online in your browser:
<long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids>
Ironically in this case the HTML message they so dearly hoped I'd see is only a notification that there is an update and I should go to the website and login to see what the update is. To top it off, the only picture in the message is the company's logo.
The worst part of those is that most of the time the HTML isn't even HTML. It's encoded in some some sort of weird email-html-specific content type. Base64 if you're lucky. Something far more obscure and email-html specific if you not.
When that happens I then have to copy the raw encoded "text" into some shady website $email-html-specific-content-type to text converter just to get the html in it's natural character set to manually find and copy the <long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids>.
This sounds great until you realize that, in the real world, people want to have some options to format the text they write (italics, bold, hyperlinks and the like), and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
In the real world, people want to have their company logo, nine image links to their social media accounts, and a special font for their signature.
Then they top post their entire email to a 257 email chain, so you have to do a kind of inverted scavenger hunt in order to figure out what they're talking about, none of which is improved or aided by the company logo, special font, or image links to nine different social media accounts.
And I haven't even gotten to grandma's love of emojis to convey her appreciation of your ribald joke about cookies.
Email is a tool, and like all tools, it can be grossly misused and abused.
Including, apparently, the people who created the web site, and who use bold text and different font sizes to format the headlines, colors to indicate features which are supported and not supported, and an image of a "plaintext certified" stamp.
I blame HTML email on the old UNIX neckbeards who hated on this kind of thing. If they had just given us the reasonable stuff, the industry wouldn't have had to resort to awful hacks.
It takes HTML as input and generates markdown-esque plaintext, with the main focus being to make the plaintext version easy and pleasant to read for human beings. Then using MIME types*, you transmit both the rich html version alongside the generated text/plain version.
This is cool because it makes it easy to respect both rich clients (like Gmail et. al.) as well as command-line or other clients which work better with simple text.
Hope this helps folks have the best of both worlds! :) cheers
* n.b. To ensure this works properly, be sure to use the right MIME headers:
I'm definitely a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to email. Email is about communication and html gives people tools that they mostly use to make communication harder, not easier. For me, I prefer plain text email when I can get it. The main issue for me is that most of the uses of html email I see simply do not increase the utility of the email from the reader's perspective.
Large signatures don't communicate anything useful to me that isn't in the email header. The phone number can be nice, but you didn't need html for that. Your brand identity that takes up half a page (more since I keep email in a small window to the side of my monitor) does nothing other than obscure the content of the email. Trust me, sending me an intensely formatted email with lots of pictures does not increase the likelihood of me doing business with you.
99% of email I receive contains < 1 paragraph of useful information. I would prefer if people just sent that. Then I can read it quickly (since it uses the same font as everything else, not that faux handwriting font you found somewhere and thought looked great) and respond quickly and helpfully, which I hope was the purpose you sent the email in the first place.
There's probably a 1% where a nicely formatted document with graphs and images and headers are helpful. But you can just attach a document to the email if you're going to put that kind of effort it.
HTML is what killed email. The younger generation hates email in part because they associate email with spam, and spam email only became a large business because of HTML email. Plain text email could not easily be used for advertising, nor did plain text email support clever, manipulative tricks, like embedding hidden images so as to track people without them being aware of being tracked. Also, HTML email was implemented without enough thought as to the security and privacy problems it allowed, and it took 20 years to lock down HTML email to limit the damage to security and privacy. Plain text email was a great communication technology, and fairly immune to spam. I've often thought we should re-launch plain text email as some new, separate protocol. A wider demographic would be willing to communicate with plain text email, just as a wider demographic is comfortable with text messages on their phones.
Spam heavily uses styling and formatting features of HTML.
Similarly, paper advertising uses a lot of color and glossy paper.
Saying that HTML killed email is like saying glossy and colorful print killed books.
Plain text is plainly unusable for a significant amount of people. Mobile? Have fun with a small font size to accommodate 80 chars. Ultra-wide? Same flowing problems. Right to Left language? Learn to 'work' with zero-width characters or you're SOL. Want to give more data to screen readers (sometimes the table is actually a table)? Hah.
Some people need to understand there are more use cases to email than mailing lists and that the 90s aren't coming back.
If your display device can't even handle 80 column monospaced text then you need another display device.
There is nothing special about a smart phone that should prevent the display of the most basic format there is. The problem is with the email client...
There was a long-ish thread on the mutt mailing list recently, which open my narrow mind a bit.
Html formatted mails are not a question of personal preference. Exchanging Mails with other people also includes supporting their way of dealing with mails.
So since a long time I convert text/html to plain text in order to be able to read that. Since recently, I also send a simple multipart mail with both text/plain and text/html. The conversion script it a simple 10 lines python markdown script. All done and all happy.
In particular, it makes my mail more readable on any kind of display; e.g. narrow phone or wide monitor.
I'm still happy to converse only via text/plain, like here.
I love fangless manifestos like this, because they're usually right, and there's nothing better than a quixotic crusade. Here's the hill I'll die on: email works best when it's like a long-form SMS message.
As for the folks who go on about branded marketing emails… gawd, it's like hearing someone say "actually I wish I got more, better junk mail"
It's a pity that something like Markdown didn't exist back in the nineties. If we could just have had some really basic formatting options (bold, italics, and a couple images are not unreasonable requests), the whole scourge of HTML email might have been sidestepped.
Not true. 90% of the emails I get from real people are plain-text. 100% of the emails I get from businesses are HTML. It makes it quick and easy to sort out a lot of the garbage.
This is the true answer, everyone uses them and that battle has been lost years and years ago.
The effort should be fought in adding a newer way of doing HTML email that is better, and finally kill that damn IE 6-based renderer used by Outlook. Curse that thing.
Yes, this. Also, any good email client will strip out the graphics and just give you formatted text anyway. I use Fastmail's web interface and there's a "Load Images" button but I rarely click it. Best of both worlds.
I default to plain-text 99% of the time.
In my corporate world I am FORCED to embed excel tables, colour-coded replies (Bob's replies are in RED, Alice's replies are in GREEN) [fuck the colour blind].
And I hate it.
So it's only those emails that get it. I have been forced to conform. Outlook is still configured for plain-text email, and bitches about it whenever possible.
Everywhere else, plain-text only.
Resistance is futile.
The real problem with HTML emails is inconsistent rendering by different email clients. I had to make some HTML email templates for a marketing campaign, thought it would be easy seeing as I make HTML website template all day.... ended up spending hours debugging random Microsoft Outlook rendering inconsistencies and other client issues.
Some clients don't support anything but inline styles, others support style tags. Some support media queries, some don't. Some support custom fonts / web fonts, some don't. Gmail in browser behaves differently from Gmail android client behaves differently from Gmail iOS client, etc. There's an absolutely infuriating dark mode on Outlook that randomly swaps certain color hues and as far as I can tell there's no way to detect or show different styles for it, you just have to make your design stand up to certain colors being swapped (don't use any logo or other image that can't stand clearly against both black and white backgrounds). I learned a lot about a bunch of extremely legacy HTML and CSS rules that would never be used in a modern website but were basically required for a semi-responsive email.
I won't ever do it again- if I need a custom styled email, I'll use someone else's template or email template builder service.
Thanksfully, you are not alone, and lots of these cuts have been codified into best practices...and published as guides by the big players in the email marketing world (e.g. mailchimp, campaign monitor, etc.). If/Whenever you need to work in this area, just look up one of those guides from those established players and follow their lead...better yet, grab one of their templates when they offer them. In addition, as @cygned has noted, there are even some "meta languages" (like MJML and many others) created by these same big email providers that serve to do away with some of the more annoying parts of crafting email templates. Of course, i hope to never have to spend too muich time in creating templates for email....just too many nightmares from so many yearsplaying in this space! ;-)
Don't. Your plain text email is going to render like shit in any modern mail client, and you are going to look like fool who can't write an email.
You should actually try this if you use plain text email - email yourself and try and read it in a normal mail client (gmail, outlook, etc) on a phone. You'll need to scroll horizontally to read the message.
Now read it on a normal desktop email client. You'll see a skinny tall column of text in a tiny font.
Now reply to a normal html email thread and view it in a normal mail client. Congrats - you've just broken the formatting for everyone* on the thread. Nobody wants you see those >> things all over the place.
I don't know why this idea persists. Nobody wants to read a book in a fixed width font, nobody wants to read a web page in a fixed width font that doesn't adapt to your viewport size, etc. Hell, programmers even want colors and fancy formatting in their source code.
Plain text email is the ham radio of the internet. If you are an email hobbiest and you enjoy sending and receiving plain text emails to other hobbiests more power to you. But don't try and setup a meeting at work over your ham radio. You'll just look dumb.
> You should actually try this if you use plain text email - email yourself and try and read it in a normal mail client (gmail, outlook, etc) on a phone. You'll need to scroll horizontally to read the message.
OK, I just did. I didn't have any of those issues at all. Perhaps it depends on the exact mail client you use?
There are some valid reasons to avoid using HTML email (some of which are even listed on this page -- like avoiding link obfuscation), but my god does this page come off as condescending, right from the opening line ("Plain-text email is strongly preferred").
The reality is that HTML email's too convenient to go away at this point. It fills enough niches both in people's corporate and personal lives to ever truly be undone, and having so many of the recommended clients being TUI-based (and emacs-based, apparently) shows a particular tone-deafness since TUI mail clients will almost certainly never be widely-adopted ever again, even by people who spend lots of time in a shell. Add on to that, that TUI mail clients will almost invariably render monospace fonts, which aren't great for reading things other than code.
I will rather use HTML email via standard federated email network and be able to put images inline with text captions describing these images, rather than being text only email purist and then having to bend over to send images with "inlined" text in silo apps like whatsapp, slack, signal or telegram.
I run into difficulties with text-wrapping in plain-text emails. If there are nested quotations, the wrapping can get jumbled, especially if reading on a small screen like a smartphone. Don't have that issue with html emails. Am I doing something wrong?
I never allow HTML to render in my emails, for security purposes.
I've found it to be rather helpful in determining which emails to delete immediately. If it's HTML, it's probably commercial in nature, and if I can't easily read the contents in the HTML source, then it's certainly an email that isn't worth reading at all.
That said, email in general would be greatly improved if it were strictly plain-text.
[+] [-] AdamH12113|3 years ago|reply
Inline images are a huge, huge advantage, especially for internal business communications where an email may be the only real documentation of a problem and its solution. (Or at least the only documentation that can stand on its own -- the alternative is usually a PowerPoint deck with missing information that was only given in a one-time presentation.) Being able to add a graph or a table or a schematic or a photo is important for anyone who works with non-text data. I suspect some programmers may be unaware of how unusual it is to work entirely in text.
[+] [-] queuebert|3 years ago|reply
For example, my workplace no longer allows forwarding or IMAP access because of this, so I'm forced to use the sh*tty Outlook web client, which wastes untold numbers of minutes each day waiting on the damn thing to load something. Just now it wouldn't let me open a PDF in a native client, because I guess Microsoft is so obsessed with locking us into their ecosystem. Instead I had to save it to disk first then go to the file manager to load it. (Yo, MSFT, this is why people hate you.)
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soheil|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boffinism|3 years ago|reply
I think it's significant that this is written in the passive voice. Because written this way it has the semblance of officialness, of generalness. Whereas writing it in the active voice would reveal that the people doing the preferring are just the people who made this website, and this preference is just that: a preference.
I love HTML emails, because I use italics basically all the time in my writing, and underscores _just don't offer the same experience_.
[+] [-] wrs|3 years ago|reply
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1896
[+] [-] petercooper|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soheil|3 years ago|reply
> "Plaintext Certified" graphic by Jens
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hilbert42|3 years ago|reply
I agree with you. Moreover, there's very little chance of any agreement about this in the foreseeable future. Those who believe that plaintext is God's gift to emailers will never change their views. They've held these views for many decades, so there's precious little chance of them doing so anytime soon.
We've seen this all before in many other endeavors both technical and nontechnical. Those who wrote with quills and fountain pens said that writing would go to the dogs if ballpoint pens became commonplace.
Fortran programmers resisted going from upper to lowercase (even now, this modern browser editor has a hangover from that long gone era as it automatically converted 'Fortran' to uppercase as was the once custom). As a longtime Fortran programmer, I'd suggest that if decisions about the human-computer interface were left to my kind then we'd likely still be using uppercase ASCII and telex machine would still be fashionable although perhaps considerably faster.
As is usually the case, there's often some truth to the arguments and promoters of a cause buttress them up with historical usage or precedent so as to strengthen their case. Making their arguments sound credible is an essential part of convincing neophytes and potential converts that they're right.
I'll briefly go back to the fountain pen example for a moment as it's analogous to this case and it's simple and easy to understand. There's considerable evidence that when the ballpoint pen overtook nibbed pens a little after WWII that writing did in some ways go to the dogs but the ballpoint only shares part of the blame, things were much more complex than it alone.
I have some authority in saying that as I'm a regular user of fountain pens and I own quite a number of them. Moreover, my writing is much less sloppy with them than when I use ballpoints not to mention the fact that I actually prefer writing with a nib as it provide much better haptic feedback than do ballpoints. There's little argument about that and the evidence is easily demonstrated by examining the writing of current users of said pens.
That said, that's only part of the story. There are also other reasons for why writing deteriorated at that time but it's off topic so I won't go into specifics. However, the relevant point with this example is that the promulgators of nibbed pens only promote their benefit - that of better handwriting. What they omit and never tell you about are the many disadvantages that nibbed pens have: ink gets everywhere, they're messy and time consuming to fill even when using ink cartridges - and probably the worst of all: take a fountain pen on a plane trip and the reduced air pressure forces ink out and all over one's shirt pocket. Right, there couldn't be a worse place for that to happen. And it happens frequently (I know from experience).
Back to plaintext email, it's what its promoters do not tell you about that's the real problem. The list is long but there's little point detailing them all here except to say that two stand out. If images and tables cannot be included as inline information then either they're likely to be lost or misplaced and second, that having to encode and transmit them separately by other means is both time consuming and error prone even if done within the same email client.
Moreover, plaintext doesn't have the range of glyphs and or the means of displaying them so that the presentation of the message information is simple and easy for the average nontechnical user to understand.
Try sending math equations in plaintext and you'll quickly get the 'picture'. Yes, it can be done but it's also messy, time consuming and error prone.
Things that are noticeable about the promoters of plaintext: they're often programmers or those who are experienced in abbreviating messages, they talk in acronyms and understand complex concepts even though their presentation may be poor, and thus they've little interest in presentation for the sake of clarity.
Unfortunately, these attributes are so often what ordinary users lack and it's specifically why big companies such as Microsoft use HTML email. Making software easier is supposedly part of their plan even if they often screw these processes up during deployment.
Like you, I like HTML email, however I'm still critical of it for the reason that at this point in its development it still does not have sufficiently well developed formatting to do what I want to do. For instance, no email client is yet capable of inserting math equations into email with ease.
My philosophy about email is very simple: a user should be able to insert into a message any type of information that can be printed in a book or drawn or scribbled on paper by hand and it should be transmissible to the recipient without any loss of formatting. QED!
Right, we aren't there yet and this view is the antithesis of the plaintext philosophy. Nevertheless, that's what eventually will happen whether the plaintext-ers like it or not.
A final point: you'll note that plaintext-ers are always whingeing about users who cut-and-paste from word processors and web pages and that the info gets garbled in the process; well, they've a valid point.
However, this has nothing to do with the issue that email presentation and formatting should be as easy and as versatile as is possible. The fact that most email clients are woefully bad - in fact outright disgraceful - is a separate issue altogether.
Moreover, I'd suggest many mail clients would be in a much better state than they are at present if the plaintext-ers weren't sabotaging their development. After all, many of them have actually developed mail packages and they give little or no priority to HTML messages not to mention their fervent propaganda in favor of plaintext email.
__
Edit: this plaintext email story is not the only one to appear in the last day or so on HN about email content. The other, however, took a diametrically opposing view to this story as it discusses various ways of maintaining accurate CSS formatting in emails - now that's one hell of a jump from plaintext messages.
That story only demonstrates that the gap between the plaintext-ers and those who want advanced HTML formatting is as wide as ever. After reading it you'll likely realize that ultimately plaintext-ers will have very little chance of winning against strong commercial pressures that want better formatting within email.
The link below is to my comment and deals with many of the issues mentioned herein. Therein, I use Thunderbird to demonstrate some of the many problems with current email clients.
Incidentally, as that story was earlier I wouldn't be a bt surprised if this plaintext one was posted as a countermeasure to the former.
https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32807489.
[+] [-] quasarj|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cube00|3 years ago|reply
We have tried to send you this email as HTML (pictures and words) but it wasn't possible. In order for you to see what we had hoped to show you please click here to view online in your browser:
<long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids>
Ironically in this case the HTML message they so dearly hoped I'd see is only a notification that there is an update and I should go to the website and login to see what the update is. To top it off, the only picture in the message is the company's logo.
[+] [-] superkuh|3 years ago|reply
When that happens I then have to copy the raw encoded "text" into some shady website $email-html-specific-content-type to text converter just to get the html in it's natural character set to manually find and copy the <long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids>.
[+] [-] Existenceblinks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmitriid|3 years ago|reply
To make maters worse, there's now AMP for email, https://amp.dev/about/email/
[+] [-] mrzool|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deltarholamda|3 years ago|reply
Then they top post their entire email to a 257 email chain, so you have to do a kind of inverted scavenger hunt in order to figure out what they're talking about, none of which is improved or aided by the company logo, special font, or image links to nine different social media accounts.
And I haven't even gotten to grandma's love of emojis to convey her appreciation of your ribald joke about cookies.
Email is a tool, and like all tools, it can be grossly misused and abused.
[+] [-] hesk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaytaylor|3 years ago|reply
https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text/
https://jaytaylor.com/html2text
It takes HTML as input and generates markdown-esque plaintext, with the main focus being to make the plaintext version easy and pleasant to read for human beings. Then using MIME types*, you transmit both the rich html version alongside the generated text/plain version.
This is cool because it makes it easy to respect both rich clients (like Gmail et. al.) as well as command-line or other clients which work better with simple text.
Hope this helps folks have the best of both worlds! :) cheers
* n.b. To ensure this works properly, be sure to use the right MIME headers:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3902455/mail-multipart-a...
[+] [-] joshmanders|3 years ago|reply
Now whatever the receiver decides they want to view they can.
[+] [-] cjf101|3 years ago|reply
Large signatures don't communicate anything useful to me that isn't in the email header. The phone number can be nice, but you didn't need html for that. Your brand identity that takes up half a page (more since I keep email in a small window to the side of my monitor) does nothing other than obscure the content of the email. Trust me, sending me an intensely formatted email with lots of pictures does not increase the likelihood of me doing business with you.
99% of email I receive contains < 1 paragraph of useful information. I would prefer if people just sent that. Then I can read it quickly (since it uses the same font as everything else, not that faux handwriting font you found somewhere and thought looked great) and respond quickly and helpfully, which I hope was the purpose you sent the email in the first place.
There's probably a 1% where a nicely formatted document with graphs and images and headers are helpful. But you can just attach a document to the email if you're going to put that kind of effort it.
[+] [-] lkrubner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nuancebydefault|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yyyk|3 years ago|reply
Some people need to understand there are more use cases to email than mailing lists and that the 90s aren't coming back.
[+] [-] discreditable|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThePowerOfFuet|3 years ago|reply
Whoever said the column width has to be 80 chars everywhere?
[+] [-] upofadown|3 years ago|reply
There is nothing special about a smart phone that should prevent the display of the most basic format there is. The problem is with the email client...
[+] [-] yonrg|3 years ago|reply
There was a long-ish thread on the mutt mailing list recently, which open my narrow mind a bit. Html formatted mails are not a question of personal preference. Exchanging Mails with other people also includes supporting their way of dealing with mails.
So since a long time I convert text/html to plain text in order to be able to read that. Since recently, I also send a simple multipart mail with both text/plain and text/html. The conversion script it a simple 10 lines python markdown script. All done and all happy.
In particular, it makes my mail more readable on any kind of display; e.g. narrow phone or wide monitor.
I'm still happy to converse only via text/plain, like here.
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|3 years ago|reply
As for the folks who go on about branded marketing emails… gawd, it's like hearing someone say "actually I wish I got more, better junk mail"
It's a pity that something like Markdown didn't exist back in the nineties. If we could just have had some really basic formatting options (bold, italics, and a couple images are not unreasonable requests), the whole scourge of HTML email might have been sidestepped.
[+] [-] hammyhavoc|3 years ago|reply
I hear ya on Markdown.
[+] [-] itslennysfault|3 years ago|reply
Whaaaaat? How about a more honest version...
> HTML emails are mainly used BY LITERALLY EVERYONE
[+] [-] JohnFen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moxieta|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
The effort should be fought in adding a newer way of doing HTML email that is better, and finally kill that damn IE 6-based renderer used by Outlook. Curse that thing.
[+] [-] UberFly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UI_at_80x24|3 years ago|reply
I default to plain-text 99% of the time. In my corporate world I am FORCED to embed excel tables, colour-coded replies (Bob's replies are in RED, Alice's replies are in GREEN) [fuck the colour blind].
And I hate it. So it's only those emails that get it. I have been forced to conform. Outlook is still configured for plain-text email, and bitches about it whenever possible.
Everywhere else, plain-text only. Resistance is futile.
[+] [-] naet|3 years ago|reply
Some clients don't support anything but inline styles, others support style tags. Some support media queries, some don't. Some support custom fonts / web fonts, some don't. Gmail in browser behaves differently from Gmail android client behaves differently from Gmail iOS client, etc. There's an absolutely infuriating dark mode on Outlook that randomly swaps certain color hues and as far as I can tell there's no way to detect or show different styles for it, you just have to make your design stand up to certain colors being swapped (don't use any logo or other image that can't stand clearly against both black and white backgrounds). I learned a lot about a bunch of extremely legacy HTML and CSS rules that would never be used in a modern website but were basically required for a semi-responsive email.
I won't ever do it again- if I need a custom styled email, I'll use someone else's template or email template builder service.
[+] [-] mxuribe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cygned|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobsenscott|3 years ago|reply
You should actually try this if you use plain text email - email yourself and try and read it in a normal mail client (gmail, outlook, etc) on a phone. You'll need to scroll horizontally to read the message.
Now read it on a normal desktop email client. You'll see a skinny tall column of text in a tiny font.
Now reply to a normal html email thread and view it in a normal mail client. Congrats - you've just broken the formatting for everyone* on the thread. Nobody wants you see those >> things all over the place.
I don't know why this idea persists. Nobody wants to read a book in a fixed width font, nobody wants to read a web page in a fixed width font that doesn't adapt to your viewport size, etc. Hell, programmers even want colors and fancy formatting in their source code.
Plain text email is the ham radio of the internet. If you are an email hobbiest and you enjoy sending and receiving plain text emails to other hobbiests more power to you. But don't try and setup a meeting at work over your ham radio. You'll just look dumb.
[+] [-] JohnFen|3 years ago|reply
OK, I just did. I didn't have any of those issues at all. Perhaps it depends on the exact mail client you use?
[+] [-] mycoborea|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _verandaguy|3 years ago|reply
The reality is that HTML email's too convenient to go away at this point. It fills enough niches both in people's corporate and personal lives to ever truly be undone, and having so many of the recommended clients being TUI-based (and emacs-based, apparently) shows a particular tone-deafness since TUI mail clients will almost certainly never be widely-adopted ever again, even by people who spend lots of time in a shell. Add on to that, that TUI mail clients will almost invariably render monospace fonts, which aren't great for reading things other than code.
[+] [-] russfink|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vanous|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] funnybookbinder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnFen|3 years ago|reply
I've found it to be rather helpful in determining which emails to delete immediately. If it's HTML, it's probably commercial in nature, and if I can't easily read the contents in the HTML source, then it's certainly an email that isn't worth reading at all.
That said, email in general would be greatly improved if it were strictly plain-text.