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This is all very nice, but the fact that the article doesn't even _mention_ images or attachments shows how divorced it is from the reality of most people's ema
by MikeTaylor 9y ago
This is all very nice, but the fact that the article doesn't even _mention_ images or attachments shows how divorced it is from the reality of most people's email experience.
I happily used emacs as my mail-reader from 1989 to about 2009 (first RMAIL mode, then VM). The increasing importance of non-text formats made it cumbersome, and I somewhat reluctantly switched to GMail. It's hard to imagine switching back now.
- erikb 9y agoattachments yes, but images? There's literally zero reason to have any images in emails. Use Dropbox/Owncloud/Instagram/etc links if you want to share pictures. That's more handy for other people anyway instead of handling 2 gig of attachments for seeing your email on their smart phone.
- uberchet 9y ago"Literally zero reason?" Seriously? I submit your understanding of how email works for most people in 2017 is outdated. Email with inline images is common, useful, and not going anywhere.
- erikb 9y agoOver the last 10 years I have worked with 4 digits worth of people. Managers, sales people, engineers, family members, locals, Western foreigners, Arab foreigners, Asian foreigners. I can't remember a single communication where direct insertion of images was a desired feature. If at all images were in emails because the email clients interpreted adding attachments in image format as part of the emails content (gmail client for instance). I'd argue that images in emails means that you haven't reached 2017 yet, where there are loads of better options to share images.
- uberchet 9y agoI'd argue, in turn, that your experience, regardless of how many people were involved, is divergent from the way in which email itself is moving in the broader market of users. Images as links to something else, that require an additional step, are an inferior substitute to inline images. Here in 2017, it's possible to build an email that includes tables or screenshots or other rich media that exist as part of the email itself. This is commonly viewed as a benefit. 20 years ago, I, too, was resistant to the idea that email should be something other than plain text, but I was wrong. That ship has saild. Email today is a rich document, and rich documents often include meaningful inline images that should be stored with the document. Again, that YOU don't like this doesn't mean it's not useful or widely used by other people.
- erikb 9y agoBut where is this kind of email happening besides the spam box? The way you argue this should be common and hit me in the face every day no matter my resistance. What I see is that less and less fluff is added to emails. A lot of work emails don't even contain a footer anymore, less and less people actually use greeting formulas, in some regards the whole communication moved from emails to other media like social media (even at work, where it is just a inhouse FB clone instead of the original). Can you name a few examples of such rich media emails you recently received or sent and to/from whom (categorywise, e.g. family member, colleague, customer, department type)?
- uberchet 9y agoWhere? My inbox and outbox. Obviously, people use email in different ways. This thread seems to have attracted a large number of people who exist in a text-only email world, but nearly every email I send or receive includes at least some rich formatting, and it's very common for us to include inline images of screenshots or other graphics as part of these emails. And we're not web designers. We make project management software. So: for me, mostly work email, though I certainly get no small number of personal mails with photos attached. Again, that YOUR experience with email doesn't include rich text or inline images outside your spam folder doesn't mean those features are valuable and useful to other people.
- JdeBP 9y agoA fair amount of other people would I suspect argue that your idea of images as external content in mail messages is a regression to the bad old days. * http://jdebp.eu./Proposals/gnksoa-mua.html#NoAutoFetchExternalContent http://jdebp.eu./Proposals/gnksoa-mua.html#NoAutoFetchExtern...
- diegoprzl 9y agoI used mu4e in Emacs. For HTML and images there is a view in browser function. Now I use Claws Mail with Emacs as the editor. This solution lacks integration with Org-Mode so I may end up going back to Emacs.
- gnuvince 9y agoI started using Emacs's mu4e package for my email at work. It's mostly mail from Github about pull requests, so no fancy HTML or images in there. I also integrated a small shell script I wrote to fetch a patch from a private repo on Github, so that when I open an email, if there is a link to the pull req (e.g. https://github.com/org/repo/pull/123 https://github.com/org/repo/pull/123) I can open the patch directly inside Emacs. Since I don't like to review code in the browser, this is quite helpful to me. In addition, by staying in Emacs rather than going to Firefox, I am way less likely to open HN or lobste.rs and start reading.
- godzillabrennus 9y agoRichard Stallman (RMS) uses emacs for email as well. I can't imagine it. Too much valuable information comes in the form of rich emails for me to even try.
- calpaterson 9y agoI think emacs can probably do a reasonable job of processing and displaying the subset of html that is often used in email. For anything really fancy you can open it in a browser (which is something I regularly do in outlook as well).
- taeric 9y agoThe only reason I still open Outlook regularly is to deal with calendar invites. Otherwise, gnus actually works just fine for email. Better, in many ways.
- skratlo 9y agoHe's not getting rich emails, he's only getting patches. Works for him. Wouldn't work for me.
- rekado 9y agoHe doesn't seem to get many patches. Most email discussions where I see him involved are, well, discussions. This rarely involves patches.
- mikegerwitz 9y agoThis is in part a cultural thing. Within GNU, many are hostile toward non-plaintext e-mail and might even ask you to resend plaintext. But we're a group of people that live and die by text. Many hackers are extremely efficient in processing text. Adding document formats like HTML into the mix muddies things unless you have very specialized tools for dealing with it. And then you have people who start using formatting semantically, e.g. colors. Now, with all of that said, Emacs does a remarkable job of rendering a subset of HTML. For example, I have my mail client configured to always ignore HTML alternatives unless they're the only option. In that case, colors and tables and such are all rendered as they should be. Inline images might be supported if you use a graphical version of Emacs (Emacs can definitely display images, I just haven't tried in this context); you also have the option to open it in an external viewer, like a web browser.
- chii 9y agothe only images i find are either from spammy adverts or tracking pixels. Normal people don't put images in emails. As for attachments, you can open them in their native programs just fine.
- user5994461 9y agoNormal people absolutely put images in their emails. Email clients like gmail/outlook put images in the content of the email (NOT an attachment) when you drag/drop files onto the window or when you copy/paste a picture inside the mail. There was a time when this all went to attachment, that is not the case anymore.
- simias 9y agoThose images are effectively attachments that are referenced in the markup of the HTML. You can still view them just fine as attachment in mutt. Sure it can be cumbersome if the various images are interleaved with commentary, but in my experience 99% of the time it's "Here are the pictures/documents you wanted" followed by a few attachments (inline or not). There's a very, very small proportion of emails where HTML is actually mandatory to make sense of the contents. And for those I can just tell mutt to load the HTML in my web browser. I very seldom have to do that though, not enough to be a real nuisance.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- huskyr 9y agoI suppose you have never worked together with a designer (but maybe those are not normal people).
- krylon 9y ago> Normal people don't put images in emails. I am not sure of your definition of normal. ;-) Part of my duties at work include help desk and maintenance of a few pieces of software. I get eMail with screen shots of error messages on a fairly regular basis. (Personally, I have made my peace with HTML eMail, what I really dislike are those humongous email signatures with corporate logos and silly disclaimers that often dwarf the email body itself.)
- grive 9y agoImages are opened like any image on your system: by using an image viewer. For non-text formats, I only deal with HTML. For them, I pipe the mail through a terminal-based browser before reading it. All of this is done automatically, literally a one-line configuration in the proper file, a thing that is explained at length in most mutt guides.
- rtpg 9y agoNo one is questioning one's ability to look at an image attachment through an image viewer. I think you know this, which makes this sort of reply doubly frustrating. Think about how word processors were a thing so early in personal computers, despite then actually being some of the most complicated bits of software one can build. What are e-mails if not documents? Having some control over formatting (at least in the semantic sense, like HTML) is a core part of using computers for a huge part of the population. Yes, even the people using only their phone. People like bolding text. A lot of people aren't good at it, but a lot of people aren't good at talking either.
- simion314 9y agoMy GUI client blocks images by default and I almost never need to have the images display because all images are from advertising(maybe for other people use case they get more images)
- collyw 9y agoWouldn't it just be easier to use a graphical client that does that sort of thing by default?
- jstanley 9y agoGraphical email clients are universally buggy and slow. That's the advantage of mutt. That said, I still find Thunderbird better than mutt, even though it takes ages to do anything and crashes 3 times a day.
- 9y ago
- morganvachon 9y agoIt's a use case thing. I would argue that for most people who actually still use email for communication with peers, images and attachments are an afterthought. For images, we have image hosting sites, and for attachments we have a plethora of cloud hosting services that allow you to send a link instead of the entire attachment. That said, there's a happy medium between console based email and bloated, buggy clients like Thunderbird. Claws Mail is a very old-school graphical client that supports modern email features, and it's about as tweakable as it gets.
- extra88 9y ago> for attachments we have a plethora of cloud hosting services that allow you to send a link instead of the entire attachment. Is there an email client that, when you drag a file icon into the composition window, doesn't attach the file but instead uploads the file to cloud storage and inserts a link? Now that I think about it, that's basically what Apple Mail's Mail Drop feature does (file is uploaded to iCloud, I think on send, recipients don't have to use Apple Mail and the file only remains on the server 30 days). Thinking about the usual steps to attach a file compared to including a link to a hosted file, I think the latter much more takes one mentally out of the composition mode to deal with the hosting/sharing; dragging in a file attachment "I'm writing an email that references a file. I get out of email to find the file. I'm dragging the file into the message window. I'm sending the email, it seems like its taking longer to send because it's a large file attachment." "I'm writing an email that references a file. I get out of email to find the file. I move (or copy) the file to my cloud storage place (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.). I set the file to be shared. I copy the link to the file. I go back to my email and paste the link (or write some link text in HTML email and paste the URL). I'm sending the email."
- rekado 9y agoLike others here I'm using mu4e in Emacs and it does a fine job at displaying images. It can also switch to rendering the HTML email in the same buffer.
- Maakuth 9y agoI've used Thunderbird, Gmail and now mutt for my e-mail needs, and so far I've liked mutt the best. For the communication I do via e-mail, it's very rare that the non-text content is very important, so the text only mode allows for more focused experience. Besides, Gmail is never far away, just a matter of opening (or finding) the browser tab.
- ziotom78 9y agoI have to agree. After years using Thunderbird, I switched to mutt in 2015 and used it as my unique email client till a few months ago, when I switched back to Thunderbird. Despite its fantastic speed, the difficulty to handle attachments is what set me back. I am a researcher, and when my colleagues want to discuss results they have the nasty habit of sending plots and documents as email attachments. My most important emails have PDF documents or plots attached, with the email text commenting the attachment itself. The problem with mutt is that it allows you to start helper supporting application to open attachments, but it waits for the application to finish before returning to the email text. This is not what I want, for I obviously have to read the email and view the attachment at the same time! The usual trick here is to fire the application in background (using "&"), so that mutt can resume operations immediately after the helper application has started. The problem is that once mutt resumes, it removes the temporary file containing the attachment, so if the helper application starts slowly it might not find it. One can force mutt to wait some seconds after having launched the helper application, but this not helps if the attachment is a multi-page PDF file, because once the wait has expired, the PDF file disappears and is no longer browsable. I must say that using mutt was an enlightening experience (email browsing can be fast, after all!), but thunderbird makes me far more productive.
- branchless 9y agoMutt bg run: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ppt-attachments-in-mutt/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ppt-attachments-in-mutt/
- ziotom78 9y agoThanks, this is indeed a nice idea. However, it reminds me of this comic: https://xkcd.com/196/ https://xkcd.com/196/ :-)
- pge 9y agoI used mutt for several years as my primary email client. Once I got it configured, I was able to handle attachments reasonably well. The thing that killed it for me was inability to integrate with Exchange server at my office, for accessing addresses when sending and for responding to calendar invitations.
- upofadown 9y agoIn mutt you just hit "v" for instant access to the images/attachments/{html only emails} ... which is as fast and convenient as security conscious graphical clients that don't show images by default. I really don't want my client to run an html interpreter without forethought.
- ams6110 9y agoI use emacs for my mail, with the notmuch mail package which gives me Gmail-like search ability. w3m is used to display HTML email in the emacs frame, and it does a good job with tables and inline images. I find the emacs editing experience so superior to anything else that I feel hamstrung in Gmail or Outlook.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
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