[derekkraan]

If you're an outlier then I am also an outlier.

To my great annoyance, the text version of many emails is broken, I see unfilled template variables all over the place.

[distcs]

Another outlier here. Glad to see there are other like minded people on this thread.

While viewing emails on the web interface I use the email provider setting to block images from loading. That along with an ad blocker and JS blocker does a good job.

You are right that the text versions of many emails are terribly broken. I don't think the text versions are paid attention to anymore. I have been on the other side sending out mailers to our customers and while working with mailer systems I realized that the de facto way of working these days is to compose an HTML email and let the mailer system strip out all the HTML tags to create the text version. Of course that leads to terrible text versions of the emails.

[tourmalinetaco]

Yet another outlier, and I’ve experienced a similar problem in a different way.

I actually use email-to-RSS with a dedicated reader to further compartmentalize myself, and I’ve found so many needlessly mutilated plain text newsletters. I don’t understand it. Maybe some notion that HTML/CSS/JS in emails increases turnover? In some cases I get it, for instance my local grocer probably benefits heavily from all the pretty pictures and hyperlinks. However my local news org sends out almost entirely HTML-formatted “plain” text, so that just seems like useless effort. And if its because the automated mail systems use it as defaults, that makes a lot of sense.

[bregma]

Email is a text medium. If someone can't be arsed to communicate properly in a medium, then they're just poor communicators. If I can't read the text of an email, it's just spam and goes directly in the trash. I already have a full inbox; the decision is easy.

[tzs]

> Email is a text medium

That fight was doomed from the moment it got named "email". With that name people were going to expect "email" to be like postal mail but online.

With postal mail we can use any fonts and styles and colors that we can put on paper by hand or that our word processors can put on paper. We can include graphs and tables and images. We can even send files by putting them on physical media that is small enough to fit in our envelope.

And so it was pretty much inevitable that email would get the ability to handle all that too, as soon as both of these conditions came to pass: (1) the Internet became widespread in the general population and (2) common office and home computers became sufficiently capable to reasonably handle fancy documents.

[tomjen3]

My email is better when quotes are colored differently, when links are clickable and when tabular data is presented as such.

I define better in the Aristotelian sense - the emails job is to convey information into my brain and my argument is that properly formatted email is better than nonformatted email at this task.

Your email client may already do some, or all of this with plain text in which case it is essentially an (incomplete, partial, non-compatible) markdown render. But why not have a standard for how to render email that works with 99.9% of readers?

Well we do have that, and the standard is HTML. It's ugly if you look at it, but it works and that is better than being theoretical and clean, no? I mean I want to send LaTeX that adapt to the readers screen, or AsciiDoc, but that isn't going to happen.

While we could idealize about dispatching LaTeX content that can dynamically adapt to the recipient's screen size, or fantasize about the use of AsciiDoc, the reality is that such alternatives are not broadly supported and hence are currently unfeasible.

I do agree with you about blocking external images by default.

[necrotic_comp]

Using https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard, you can set it up so that you can view html emails in your browser with a keystroke. I've found it's the best of both worlds, since i don't really use HTML email, but I like being able to look and see what's been sent to me.