[globalreset]

Text. Just use damn text. Nobody wants to look at your logo. Why biz people have to ruin everything.

[ryanwaggoner]

Approximately no one outside of HN only wants text emails.

And the argument that anything beyond plain text is a waste and ruins everything applies to literally every single medium out there where the written word is conveyed: webpages, magazines, printed flyers, books, etc. It's laughable to think that all formatting of any kind beyond ASCII is a waste.

If it were up to HN readers, the entire world would be so ugly and boring.

[hollerith]

I love how there are thousands of internet forums, but you're a heavy participant on a forum that is so militantly text-only that emoji are silently removed from user-submitted content. It's almost like the policy you are arguing against has important effects on conversation quality that you don't understand or that you don't want to admit because your paycheck depends on email messages' being rendered as HTML.

>Approximately no one outside of HN only wants text emails.

Approximately no one outside of HN even knows that plain text is a thing distinct from HTML. Among those that do, many probably couldn't give an example from their digital experience of a place where user-submitted content must be plain text. (They can navigate those places just fine, though.)

[philposting]

Agreed. If things look good then I enjoy looking at them more, and life is to be enjoyed. But more importantly, it's wrong that plain text is always the best way to communicate. A picture is worth a thousand words (often), and a good layout can make things easier to read.

[hattmall]

Ultimately it depends on if it facilities the delivery of information. In most cases excessive styling does the opposite.

[6510]

It's more funny than that. Everyone wants text documents as well as rich documents as well as applications but no one wants a single file type to do all 3.

[postalrat]

Why doesn't HN or reddit or most social media format messages in html like email? Email has been doing it for years. People would love it! Images, colors, tables, etc in every message!

And why not in text messages? Its 2023 guys.

[Yizahi]

If only it was a simple logo. My HRs send emails with a full blown wallpaper on top, which stretches the inbox on a smaller screen so much that horizontal scroll appears, and text below it also overflows. Or when I disabple dynamic content, then they manage to create links inside the graphical buttons with no alt text, invisible without the picture. And these are people whose main job are emails. Sigh...

[graypegg]

Sticker Mule sends marketing newsletter emails in plain text ONLY. I love it. They’re just:

> Hey ${name},

> Our custom holographic stickers are on for on for ${deal}.

And that’s it. I bet they have awesome deliverability because it’s… just email.

[legitster]

Ironically, plain text emails actually do better for us - the problem is that plaintext emails are often more likely to be caught up by spam filters.

[rossdavidh]

The data I've seen suggests the opposite?

[mr_mitm]

I'm pleasantly surprised that amazon actually sends plain text emails. Pretty much every other corporation insists on HTML mails.

[bilalq]

I just checked, and they don't. It's certainly plain looking and without fancy styling/formatting, but they do send content-type text/html. The links and tracking pixel images are why they need HTML, I guess.

[hk1337]

Email is capable of having both versions of the email so the user can decide what they want. We should go back to utilizing that more.

[captn3m0]

The clients also need to focus on this. Apple Mail on iOS uses plain text variant to show snippets, but if you try to expand the email, it only supports HTML, without a fallback to plain text. This is often the case on slow internet.

[fanf2]

That isn’t true: Apple Mail is perfectly capable of showing plain-text-only messages.

[eviks]

Nobody outside a tech cave wants to lose all the rich formatting in communication either