20 ms·

Use plaintext email

337 points by ddevault 7y ago

joegreen 7y ago
I would like to read more details about "The former is strongly preferred". Why is plain text preferred and by whom?
- jypepin 7y ago
  https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext
- duiker101 7y ago
  I had the same reaction and at the bottom it goes more into details of the reasoning why plaintext is better. I, however disagree on pretty much all the points.
- ignaloidas 7y ago
  There is info about it. "4. Why is plaintext better than HTML?"
  - davidcollantes 7y ago
    Yes, but some of the rationale is up to dispute, or simply out dated. For example, there is not an email client these days that do not render rich text/HTML. Those who do not, will convert it to plain text. Nothing to lose.
- aloisdg 7y ago
  Keep reading the article: 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. and more at https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext
  - atombender 7y ago
    Is this true? All the people I interact with professionally are sending HTML email, probably because they all use Gmail.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      Sure, but are they sending it for a concious choice to prefer HTML, or because it's Gmail's default?
      - zaarn 7y ago
        Does it matter? The default is HTML, the majority of mail is HTML (or atleast multipart). So why does it matter if GMail defaults to what the majority is doing? Everyone (99.9999% of people) can receive and send HTML, so just do that, it's the informal standard for mail now.
        Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
        I think it does matter. For my rationale consult TLA.
        zaarn 7y ago
        It's great that you think that it matters but I don't think that what you think that it matters matters in practise, really, the world is HTML email now.
    - gsich 7y ago
      Do they use formatting?
      - RHSeeger 7y ago
        For myself and the people I work with, most definitely. Bold and italics in particular to highlight/accent certain parts of the text.
- mrweasel 7y ago
  Preferred seems like a weird claim. I would have worded it differently: >Plain text is sufficient for the vast majority of all non-advertising emails. None of the emails I receive on a daily basis needed to be HTML. The main reason for it, is allowing people to use their company logo in the footer.
- throw0101a 7y ago
  > Why is plain text preferred and by whom? Besides making phishing easier (by disguising links, unless you hover over them), what exactly does HTML add? Most people simply bang out a bunch of text without any formatting: what does wrapping HTML around that add? I have yet to see a layman someone add useful typographic flourishes to any business communications. Any "advanced" formatting has always come from marketers.
  - esoterica 7y ago
    People use bold and italics, section headers, inline images, tables, text highlighting. The list goes on. Is it really that hard to wrap your head around the fact that formatting is useful for communication?
    - throw0101a 7y ago
      > People use [...] Not in my experience. They hit reply, type something at the top with whatever the defaults are, and hit send. > Is it really that hard to wrap your head around the fact that formatting is useful for communication? I have all of Edward Tufte's books, as well Bringhurst's Typographic Style, and Chicago: I am aware of the usefulness of typography. I simply have not seen it in my day-to-day e-mails at work or in personal life (except for marketing spams).
      - esoterica 7y ago
        I see useful text formatting every day in the emails I send and receive. A reasonable person would accept that other people’s use cases and preferences are valid instead of writing haughty diatribes about what the platonic ideal of email should look like.
        throw0101a 7y ago
        I accept that other people's use cases and preferences differ. But given the carnage that HTML e-mail being the normal has caused in phishing and other privacy invading manners, I question whether the benefits of those use cases and preferences out-weight the detriments of the practice. Just ask John Podesta: > SecureWorks concluded Fancy Bear had sent Podesta an email on March 19, 2016, that had the appearance of a Google security alert, but actually contained a misleading link—a strategy known as spear-phishing. (This tactic has also been used by hackers to break into the accounts of other notable persons, such as Colin Powell). The link[10]—which used the URL shortening service Bitly—brought Podesta to a fake log-in page where he entered his Gmail credentials.[1][9][11][12] The email was initially sent to the IT department as it was suspected of being a fake but was described as "legitimate" in an e-mail sent by a department employee, who later said he meant to write "illegitimate".[13][14][15] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podesta_emails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podesta_emails Or countless others who have been phished.
Tomte 7y ago
Why is this a Show HN? It's just a web page, isn't it?
- beefhash 7y ago
  Probably because Sir_Cmpwn just made it. Considering his other e-mail-related website[1], I'd say that's why. [1] https://git-send-email.io/ https://git-send-email.io/
  - Tomte 7y ago
    That's not what Show HN is for. I don't submit my articles that way. It's for things (apps etc.) you can try out. Not for essays.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      You can apply the information on this page to configuring your mail client (and should!). It's also intended to serve as a one stop resource for cataloguing plaintext support in most, if not all, mail clients, in the future.
      - Tomte 7y ago
        Still no Show HN. You've been here long enough to know that.
        Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
        Clearly I disagree. Feel free to ask the mods to clarify and update the title accordingly.
    - beefhash 7y ago
      Yeah, but you're not Sir_Cmpwn. At this point, Sir_Cmpwn is practically a celebrity here with all the perks that this entails.
  - zaarn 7y ago
jve 7y ago
> Rich text features desirable for end users include things like inline images, bold or italicized text, and so on. However, the tradeoff isn't worth it. Images can simply be attached to your email, and you can employ things like asterisks, /slashes/, _underscores_, or UPPERCASE for emphasis. Well, why bother writing his own post in rich text then? He has headings, bold, links, grey font at the bottom, image. Don't get me wrong - for high security systems/environments, plaintext is way to go. For everyday life use cases I prefer html. Although with Markdown rendered text I would be pretty happy. And enough for author to cover his post sans the green/red boxes and grey text.
- DarkCrusader2 7y ago
  The page footer might interest you. It directly answers your question. Quoting "But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?" This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.
  - jve 7y ago
    Fair. I like that minimal formatting there anyway. But often I have to communicate via email, report on complex issues, etc. It is nice to have some headings, tables, images in there.
    - DarkCrusader2 7y ago
      Agreed. As much as I like plain text email personally, having inline images etc. is really helpful sometimes.
      - mavhc 7y ago
        The key is sometimes. Plain text by default, rich text when required. Software that would strip all html out of emails for security would be handy
      - u801e 7y ago
        Before MIME was common, people used to insert uuencoded data within the email message. IIRC, certain email clients would display the decoded content inline with the surrounding text.
zaarn 7y ago
>HTML as a vector for phishing I would disagree, You can make Text-only links look fairly harmless too. The issue is more often that people do not look at all, even in text-mail, what the link points to, not that they can't see it (plus you can hover and the browser still shows the URL once you open it) >Privacy invasion and tracking Only if you use an ancient and outdated client that doesn't block external resources by default or proxies them over another server. >Mail client vulnerabilities Only an issue if the client rolls their own HTML renderer. Outlook uses the IE Trident Engine, Thunderbird uses Firefox' engine, Gmail transforms using the Chromium engine internally. That means the email client is usually as secure as the respective browser, unless you use a mail client that rolls their own engine. >HTML emails are less accessible Possibly, depends on the sender. You can make them more accessible than Text though because you can prevent the screenreader from trying to read out the link or irrelevant information. >Some clients can't display HTML emails at all Most mail clients will usually bundle a text-version of the mail, some MTAs also do this on their own. Doesn't really matter in practise since 99.99% of people use a mail client that can display HTML. It feels a bit like complaining that people on the highway drive so fast that you can't properly merge into the rightmost lane with your oldtimer car. >Rich text isn't that great, anyway And tbh, this last one basically seals it; this is a website made to rant from the personal perspective of someone who blocks mails containing any HTML from their services and has quite the history of throwing people using their lib under the bus over personal preferences. I don't see how any of this is relevant when even the site itself admits that using a multipart mail with both text and HTML is sufficient, why should I even begin to send plaintext instead of doing that? Unless your mailclient is garbage, it handles multipart and will understand the mail.
- e12e 7y ago
  >> Some clients can't display HTML emails at all > Most mail clients will usually bundle a text-version of the mail, some MTAs also do this on their own. This assumes there is a proper text part (one that actually includes the content of the mail body).
  - naikrovek 7y ago
    That does not seem like much of an assumption; all modern mail clients that I am aware of do this.
owenmarshall 7y ago
I’d love someone to convince me I’m wrong - but I think we’ve lost this fight. Years of use of plaintext hostile clients by people who read our emails means bottom posting or inline replies are seen as extremely strange, and impossible when you have one of those “seven email deep” threads forwarded to you. (I know, I know, “snip it down”, but sometimes I just don’t have those minutes in my day ;)) Wrapping as well has given me trouble - I'm not sure what I settled on but I went through a period of having some users see my emails come across poorly formatted. And to that note, IIRC Outlook doesn’t do a passable job with plaintext mail, instead shoving monotype text in an ugly system font. The last time I checked I don’t think it converted > into quoting and just vomited them up. I don’t know what the solution is beyond reluctantly accepting that we have to both consume AND produce HTML email now, and make tools that do it gracefully.
- gpapilion 7y ago
  I would agree I gave this fight up sometime in early 2000s. Since email is only valuable as a network, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me to constantly argue with colleagues to send plain text + html, let alone to only send plain text. Ultimately, I decided using elm was my issue, and they were doing the natural thing.
- superkuh 7y ago
  There's no losing as long as you're being the change you want to see. I will always send plaintext emails and I have the technical skill to dig into the raw email and decode the encoded HTML data manually or rip out the relevant authorization URL/strings.
  - owenmarshall 7y ago
    You’ve just made the problem an externality. While you have the skill and desire to do that - and to be clear, as a mu user I do the same dance when I need - inbound messages are rarely the problem for me. What is a problem is outbound messages. When I try to do (what I think is) the right thing and trim the message and reply inline or bottom post, confusion abounds. I’ve had messages missed because the recipients told me they thought I accidentally sent an empty reply and didn’t scroll past the “on July 24th, superkuh wrote:” Whose fault is that? Is it the 20 people on the distribution list who learned email protocol from years of Outlook and not “the right places?” I don’t feel comfortable pushing that blame onto them.
wongarsu 7y ago
The page is about setting up email clients to send plain text emails, but most of the reasons given why plaintext is preferable are about receiving email. The remaining reasons are either "rich text isn't that great" or are trivially solved by the client (extracting plain text from a rich text email isn't hard on non-marketing emails).
beefhash 7y ago
For the convenience of anyone that may consider licensing and language it's written in a relevant part of their choice of software, here's the list of recommended e-mail clients in the submission with licensing and programming language info: - aerc: MIT, Go - alpine: Apache 2.0 (parts 4-clause BSD), C - claws mail: GPLv3, C - Gnus: LGPLv2+, elisp - KMail: GPLv2 (parts GFDLv1.2, parts LGPLv2.1), C++ - mutt: GPLv2, C - SquirrelMail: GPLv2, PHP Side note: > (context: ProtonMail) It's also recommended that you visit Settings → Account → Identity and remove the default email signature. It bears noting that free accounts on ProtonMail cannot remove the ProtonMail advertisement in the signature, cf. [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/5ageqz/question_about_protonmail_signature/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/5ageqz/question...
- erk__ 7y ago
  I would also reccoment Wanderlust [0]: GPLv2+, elisp [0]: https://github.com/wanderlust/wanderlust https://github.com/wanderlust/wanderlust
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    Can you fill out this survey for me? https://paste.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/be4f2eee45046e069a4bb175d9d5395e9c79baeb https://paste.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/be4f2eee45046e069a4bb175d9d539...
- stevekemp 7y ago
  My own client: lumail, c++, gpl https://github.com/lumail/lumail https://github.com/lumail/lumail
  - Boulth 7y ago
    It would be great if you inserted a screenshot of your client in action in the README.md. In my experience screenshots have excellent information density when it comes to evaluating software :)
    - 7y ago
davidcollantes 7y ago
I was always a strong advocate for plain text emails. Because for many years my mail client was Mutt, I saw everything plain text. Now that clients are graphical, it bothers me to know others might be reading my plain text emails with a "Times New Roman" font, and not a monospaced (as god intended it to be). So, to avoid that, I use HTML on my emails. Yes, it makes them a bit bigger. Yes, they go against my very belief. Yet, they look like I want them to be seeing.
- ignaloidas 7y ago
  Have you thought that others may not want to see your emails as you intended?
  - davidcollantes 7y ago
    End recipients can always overwrite, no?
    - ignaloidas 7y ago
      overwriting HTML styles is harder than setting how to format plaintext. HTML styling has order of magnitude more customization options than plaintext, which has three that I can think of: font, font size, tab width. Almost all clients have customization for plaintext, I haven't seen one that can override HTML customizations.
atombender 7y ago
The problems with HTML email originate in the days when clients like Outlook would produce horrendous, non-responsive HTML that were basically entire embedded web pages; the idea that the sender should be able to dictate the font of an email is a bit ridiculous, not to mention the layout, and the result was often broken depending on the email client. Emails aren't web pages, but they do benefit from formatting (bold, italics, links, paragraphs), all of which lead to better emails overall. After all, everyone has their plaintext style (asterisks for emphasis, or maybe underscores, etc.) and HTML formalizes those conventions in a way that has been standard for decades and even centuries if you consider typesetting in general. I like the idea of HTML email better than I like the implementation. I'd love to see a minimal HTML subset that only included formatting (including paragraphs, indentation and blockquoting), images and links. No tables, no box model, fonts or styling. We can keep full HTML for fancy marketing emails, but letter-form email should be simple and impossible to abuse. These days, of course, most email is HTML simply because that's the default for almost all email apps (Gmail, Outlook, Spark, Polymail, etc.). It's not true that only marketing emails use HTML, as the author claims.
- virtualritz 7y ago
  "After all, everyone has their plaintext style" This is counter to my own experience. I am using (plain text) email since 27 years. Including inline quoting and avoiding top posting at all costs. People used bold (not sure how to render a '*' in HN) /italic/ and _underscore_ consistently on lists, newsgroups and -- rarely, as seldomly needed -- in private correspondence. I learned how to do this by example. Everyone being very disciplined about this in the 90's still. This started deteriorating rapidly in the wake of eternal September [1] and Outlook becoming the standard client in the corporate world, using HTML as default. Personally I blame Outlook for HTML email hell foremost. It is very simple to display plain text email, omitting aforementioned formatters and applying them. The same goes for displaying in a proportional font (detecting intended indentations from the original and replicating them with tabs, on the fly). Using such formatters is just another (and not even alien) form of inline markup. Actually the very one that inspired markdown, ReST, etc. The only reason people use HTML email is that it's the default. Not that it's better in any way. The average user simply doesn't know any better. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
alphagrep12345 7y ago
If you block remote image loading (to thwart trackers) and be careful about phishing links, I don't see a need for plain text-only email.
- u801e 7y ago
  Most people aren't going to change the default configuration of their email client or use caution when dealing with phishing emails. But if the email is plain text, then that's not an issue.
rhabarba 7y ago
I consider support for HTML e-mails which is enabled by default a major bug in a mail client.
jraph 7y ago
Some people sending plain text mails also wrap them manually. If my window is small (maybe because I am using a small screen), the text is painful to read. And a non manually wrapped plain text is not wrapped at all in some cases. By all means, send me plain text mails, it will be lighter for my self-hosted inbox, but don't wrap them manually. If you are going to abuse /this/ kind of `formatting`, however, you are making your mail harder to read for me. These are tags anyway, just not HTML tags. I'd prefer you use the real formatting that is correctly handled in most cases, but I will adapt. > There are two main types of emails on the internet: plaintext and HTML. The former is strongly preferred You will need to back this up because this is not what I observe. My email client takes care of my privacy and my security, and you can use it too if you are concerned, it's a cross platform maintained free software. It's okay. My problems with HTML emails is colors: if you want to use something like a night mode, you will see emails with hard coded white background and black texts, or worse, only black texts. You may be able to ignore colors but people will assume you can see them. Maybe an extension like dark background on light texts when using a browser for reading emails who do the trick, but I don't.
- bo1024 7y ago
  I'm very sad about manual line wrapping too (since I love plain text otherwise), but unfortunately it's in the MIME standard. > Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF. Of course with HTML, your source code can adhere to this standard while still having arbitrarily long lines of text... https://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html https://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html
  - jorangreef 7y ago
    The RFC you quoted actually refers to line lengths within a MIME message as a whole (headers and body), and only after Content-Transfer-Encoding has been applied, not before. In other words, your text parts can have lines of arbitrary line length, provided you encode them as QuotedPrintable or Base64 and set the Content-Transfer-Encoding header accordingly, which most email clients do.
Hitton 7y ago
The part about ProtonMail and Tutanota seems pretty biased. I would like to hear how the author suggests that they should implement IMAP and SMTP without compromising the encryption. It sounds like the author prefers dubious advantages to real improved security. That's quite ridiculous considering that according to him HTML emails are: >"... a security nightmare, are mostly used for advertising to you and tracking you, are less accessible for many users, and don't offer anything especially great for it."
- ignaloidas 7y ago
  For Protonmail: maybe using PGP and sending over TLS?? Protonmail bridge basically does this, just over a proprietary protocol.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  I'm on mobile so I can't give you an adequte response, but I can link you to a previous commment I wrote on the subject... Or I would, but pasting seems to be broken on my phone as well. If anyone can search HN for "Sir_Cmpwn Protonmail" and link the relevant comment I'd appreciate it very much.
  - bandali 7y ago
    This one, I believe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008123
    - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      Thank you!
- bjpbakker 7y ago
  > the author prefers dubious advantages to real improved security Encrypting the data transfer doesn’t improve any of the HTML email security issues. So I fail to see how that would be “real improved security”. But I do share the authors sentiment on the failure to not using open standards of both Protonmail and Tutanota. So maybe I’m biased.
ThinkBeat 7y ago
He forgot about the even worse AMP emails that come out now.
mlang23 7y ago
This belongs in my ~/.signature
yyyk 7y ago
Plaintext email is really troublesome if one wants to mail in an right-to-left language. There's simply no compatible way to override the direction/embedding without HTML * , so content is often scrambled. Many mailers won't even align to right automatically if all input is in an right-to-left language. In practice, HTML email is the only compatible way to get a semi-decent experience for these languages. * To answer the obvious: the unicode bidi override characters are not a solution. They are often stripped out, and editing zero-width characters is a very 'pleasant' experience.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  Where are these characters stripped out? I can see that these create security issues with urls that get rendered with changed field order to look benign.
  - yyyk 7y ago
    I meant stripped from the mail body - though I suspect these programs would also strip them out of the other fields (I haven't checked that). In general, working with zero-width characters is a bad idea from both security and usability POV and is not a practical solution. The result is that the only reasonable and compatible way to mix LTR (left-to-right, like English) and RTL (right-to-left, as with ME languages) is with HTML email. Note that in most cases rendering is an LTR context, so even sending RTL on its own will fare poorly.
- cik 7y ago
  I came here to say exactly this. It's even harder for the real right-to-left use in the ones I speak, where we frequently mix Hebrew/Arabic with English, for using certain words that just don't exist. Plaintext mailers completely mangle emails like this, making them beyond unreadable. Mutt to its credit does the best job.
mgulick 7y ago
I'm surprised by the recommendation to use format=flowed. I set up thunderbird a while back to use the recommendations from the LKML: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/email-clients.html#email-clients https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/email-clients.... Doesn't format=flowed mangle patches? I've also disabled wrapping (as recommended in that document), however I'm not a big fan of it. I do think that plain text wrapped at 72 or 80 characters looks much nicer. I wish thunderbird allowed me to select portions of the text to wrap, or to disable wrapping for selected portions (e.g. a code snippet). Is this handled better in other email clients?
- ignaloidas 7y ago
  Now that page recommends using git send-email, on which the author also made a tutorial: https://git-send-email.io https://git-send-email.io
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    Thanks for the link - this is indeed my stance, I don't think people should be pasting patches into their daily MUA.
    - Boulth 7y ago
      That should be highlighted more. Not using git sendmail is the problem, not format=flowed.
- cpbotha 7y ago
  If you do format=flowed correctly, then code is not mangled. However, there is a higher risk (than with hard-wrapped) that users can mangle code with format=flowed.
  - u801e 7y ago
    I think it comes down to a lack of flexibility with the MUA composer. If you're using an editor like vim to compose the email, it would be easy enough to read the patch into the message by running :r file-containing-patch And then visually highlighting text and running: :'<,'>s/$/\s/ to append whitespace to lines you don't want to be hard-wrapped in clients that support format=flowed
tqwhite 7y ago
What a load of bollocks. The arguments against come down to, 'you are an idiot who can't figure out phishing links' and, well, that's it. Something about marketing emails. Stupid. Luddite. I'm surprised they don't insist you use a monospace type face in your email reader to give it that late eighties feel. I have always used HTML email, even when it was new and poorly supported. I want people who read my email to see a nice appearance. I like bold face and sometimes images. "Strongly preferred". An appeal to the Authority Fallacy is an indication of a weak argument. Or, no argument at all.
- owenmarshall 7y ago
  I think this opinion is strongly worded and might get some heat, but I think you touch on something important. Plaintext email often serves as an in group shibboleth to distinguish “us” from “the other lusers”. Does it have merit beyond that, or do these articles just reinforce that?
  - mbreese 7y ago
    I think the main issue at play here is quoting. In particular, how bad rich text/html mail programs are at dealing with inline quoting. In my opinion, that’s the main “feature” of email communication that has been lost over the years. On the top replies make it difficult to follow a nested thread of emails. If html email clients handled this better, I don’t think there would be as much of a problem. I think you’re right though that plain text acts as a bit of a shibboleth to differentiate “advanced” users vs luddites. But the main thing that I’ve heard people complain about with respect to html email is the loss of inline quoting. Plaintext has its issues too— in particular long line soft wrapping. Which some would argue would be better supported if html email hadn’t become so popular.
    - tln 7y ago
      I absolutely agree -- the aspect of email I miss from the good ol' days was well-trimmed replies and doing so inline. Threaded inboxes and smart trimming helps, but not completely. However I think that HTML clients handle this well enough but the etiquette has been completely lost. Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. > Why is top-posting such a bad thing? >> Top-posting. >>> What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
eythian 7y ago
This ship has long ago sailed. People are using email less and less these days as it is, anyway. I get personal emails less than once a week now. You'd be better off pushing people to using email for communication in place of walled-garden IM or social platform du jour (which I also think will be a losing battle in general, but perhaps more worthwhile), in which case being able to make your email look nicer might even be a draw.
tjoff 7y ago
Not having inline images is an issue though. It helps immensely with readability and usability. Especially with people that aren't as computer-savvy. Partly because many email-clients will list attachments below the mail content. And since it is standard practice to include the previous mail when responding you have to scroll a kilometer to get to the bottom with the attached images. That is just unusable. Yes, it is an issue with bad clients and not plaintext. But nonetheless it is a big issue.
- kungtotte 7y ago
  Maybe you should read the entire page? It specifically warns against top posting and quoting the entire email you're replying to. So if people followed this advice you wouldn't have to scroll a kilometer for attachments (unless someone actually wrote an email that long).
  - tjoff 7y ago
    I don't know if I've ever seen bottom-posting in my life. They have particular weak arguments against that as well. It is very useful when forwarding a message or including someone else as cc.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      When forwarding a message you should include the thread as RFC 2822 attachments (RFC number recited from memory, may be wrong). Your mail client should make this easy for you.
    - scbrg 7y ago
      It is very useful for you, the sender. It is a nightmare for the receiver. Whenever I receive one of those forwarded top posted thirty mail long horrors I just ignore everything and hope I can guess context from whatever you wrote in the last email. The alternative is to spend an hour deciphering the blob of goo that is actual mail messages mixed with signatures, attachments, all being meaningless replies to questions I haven't yet read - because top posting. Sending me such a thing is equivalent to telling me "Fuck you, your time is worth nothing to me."
tyingq 7y ago
The issue here is that most people looking for plain text email want to receive plain text email. These instructions really only help you to send plain text email. It's unclear if the receivers care either way. I am sympathetic to the issues around HTML email but it's a hard ship to turn.
moonrider 7y ago
I think this is unfortunately mostly preaching to the choir. The "industry" is moving in the opposite direction - the page should have a section on "AMP for email".
upofadown 7y ago
>Mail client vulnerabilities Yeah, this is the part that is eventually going to bite us ... hard. It is just straight up insane to allow random entities access to the vast attack surface of a web browser. Unfortunately no one seems to even care about present day ongoing attacks. We will have to wait until someone comes up with a worm that takes down email and possibly the whole net.
- jorangreef 7y ago
  MIME is hard enough: https://snyk.io/blog/how-to-crash-an-email-server-with-a-single-email/ https://snyk.io/blog/how-to-crash-an-email-server-with-a-sin...
jedicoffee 7y ago
Drew, no. - Will
ubermonkey 7y ago
My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. It's done. I'm not going back to plaintext, and I can't imagine most people will, either. There's no good reason to (in particular, the downfalls of HTML the author lists are all either easily solved or are issues orthogonal to the format of the email.)
- bachmeier 7y ago
  > There's no good reason to I used html for years. Once my email volume reached a certain point, I went back to plain text because I can read it and respond to it much faster.
  - josho 7y ago
    Neither you nor the poster provide a reason why. Why is it better? How does plain text make it faster to respond? Or even faster to read?
    - zepolen 7y ago
      images loading..2% images loading..15% images loading..29% images loading..42% images loading..58% images loading..74% images loading..89% images loading..100% ____________________________________ | | | O O | | O | | \_/ | | MY LOGO | | My catchphrase | | | | | | | |------------------------------------| | | | Hi josho! | | | | This is why it's slower to read! | | | |____________________________________|
gdfasfklshg4 7y ago
Does anyone else hate when someone assumes their screenwidth and hard wraps at 72 characters?
- yakubin 7y ago
  For me it's not about the screen width. It's simply unergonomic to read wide lines of text. Ever wondered why book pages are vertically-oriented? I don't want my eyes to run a marathon from left to right with each line of text.
ksahin 7y ago
> HTML emails are mainly used for marketing - that is, emails you probably don't want to see in the first place Wait what? Maybe you're subscribed to the wrong newsletter, but in my case, I'm subscribed to products / brand I like, I'm aware that I will receive advertisement / product updates and I'm fine with it !
omaranto 7y ago
It seems to me this webpage uses "bottom-posting" to include both what Wikipedia [1] calls bottom-posting and what it calls interleaved posting or inline replying. For example, in the section called "Top posting", the webpage advises you to "Write anything you have to say underneath the quote it pertains to.", which is interleaved posting (unless you only quote one thing). Is this abuse of language common? Am I actually on the side of bottom-posters because they really mean "write anything you have to say underneath the quote it pertains to" rather than "reply to everything at the bottom"? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
masukomi 7y ago
I just want to put it out there, that regardless of if this is a "fight worth fighting" or not. Email was a nightmare for me. I could not keep up. Coworkers would catch themselves and laugh when they asked if I'd gotten an email. Switching to neomutt has changed everything for me. I now mmaintain Inbox Zero. I write in markdown. I convert it into a multipart email with HTML in one keystroke for everyone else. Other benefits: I don't know this for a fact, but i suspect that HTML email has got to _suck_ for visually impaired people using screen readers. plaintext email means no tracking by marketers, or facebook, or anyone else. plaintext emails are also _way_ shorter. There is so much less crap to mentally deal with when all the marketing BS has been stripped away. plaintext emails give you a glimpse into just how much you're tracked too. Nevermind the privacy aspects of seeing the real url, you see that the "real" url is multiple lines long because of all the tracking they've embedded in it. It makes you think twice before clicking it.
- tomjen3 7y ago
  What is it about neomutt that allows you to be that efficient with your emails?
  - benoliver999 7y ago
    For me it's not mutt so much as being able to write and edit in vim. I can reply in-line, quickly chop out chunks of text etc etc. I'm not one to shout at people for not using plain text etc but I personally quite like it.
camillomiller 7y ago
The attitude of high-skilled tech people to think that their stripped down, interface-less, and brutalist version of something has to be simply better than anything else needs its own German term, something like Schadenfreude or Treppenwitz. I'm sure some of the German readers here can work out something.
- t0astbread 7y ago
  Isn't that just elitism/gatekeeping? Other than that "Hackerwahn" ("hacker mania") sounds like a nice term for this as mostly low-level hackers seem to show this kind of behavior. (Note: This is not meant as an insult or a generalization.)
- yakubin 7y ago
  Yeah, you really have to be a high-skilled h@x0r to write a plain text mail. /s
yoz-y 7y ago
Who does this page cater to though? The recommended tools are programs that are packaged for Linux or need compiling[1]. If they want to convince anybody who already does not prefer plaintext then they should be targeting the Windows and macOS crowd. [1]: Later some tools such as thunderbird or configuration for Apple Mail and Gmail are mentioned. They should be top and center.
arbuge 7y ago
One interesting anecdote about plain text not being the default in most popular email clients come from my own PublicEmails.com email-to-blog-post project. People would experiment with it and the allowed list of HTML tags for formatting (https://publicemails.com/blog/display/772/37f6f81d9a https://publicemails.com/blog/display/772/37f6f81d9a) but would get confused when the tags would render verbatim instead of being processed correctly. They didn't realize they were in HTML mode by default in most email clients like Gmail, and that they would have to manually switch back to plain text if they wanted to use HTML tags. I ended up adding a question to the FAQ to address this issue specifically, though people still get confused from time to time. There is a touch of irony about it - to get HTML tags to work, you have to be in plain text, not HTML mode. Once you're in HTML mode all that's needed for formatting is the client's own formatting controls.
pcunite 7y ago
Is it not ironic that the very website promoting the benefits of plain text, uses a textual medium consisting of bold, underlined, colorized, and other font effects? Something that can only be achieved via HTML enhanced emails!
- ignaloidas 7y ago
  I think footer text might interest you: > "But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?" >This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.
vbezhenar 7y ago
Thanks, I apparently found out that Claws Mail had Windows version. Default Windows E-mail client does not support text mode at all and I prefer text mode, so I'll try it.
NoGravitas 7y ago
I'd like to see formatting for email that doesn't have the security and privacy vulnerabilities and complexity of HTML email. Markdown would be fine. Inline images can refer only to attachments in the same message, not to arbitrary URLs. Maybe some restrictions on links to reduce their effectiveness in phishing emails. It would be fine. It would be everything you actually need.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > I'd like to see formatting for email that doesn't have the security and privacy vulnerabilities and complexity of HTML email. Markdown would be fine Markdown supports arbitrary HTML, and so has exactly the privacy and security implications of HTML (though there extensions available which limit this, and are standard in some markdown processors and expected by default in some markdown variants.)
  - NoGravitas 7y ago
    Okay, to be pedantic, I mean a subset of Markdown that doesn't allow arbitrary HTML, and may have additional restrictions of the types I mentioned.
hesk 7y ago
I greatly prefer top posting because it emphasizes what I'm looking for in a email reply which is new information. Moreover, modern email clients automatically hide the quoted text so only the reply, with the new information, is visible but context is available if necessary. For example: --- Let's meet at 8 pm. (Show more from person A). --- Typically, the context will be clear from reading the reply and the sender. If not, I can establish context by clicking on the link: --- Let's meet at 8 pm. > Agreed, when should we meet? >> I think we should meet face-to-face to discuss this. >>> This is a super-important discussion. >>>> I propose to implement HTML mails. >>>>> Plaintext mails suck. I missed important information because the mail used asterisks instead of bold text. --- With top posting, I can stop reading the previous mails as soon as I understand what's going on. Consider the opposite with bottom posting: Here I would have to read the entire context from the beginning or am at the mercy of how other people edited the context. EDIT: Put --- on individual lines. Fixed asterisks formatting.
- frenchyatwork 7y ago
  That's only relevant because you're including your whole thread (or part of it, if there's forks) in your email. As far as I know, there's no real reason for people to do this anymore. Email clients should be able to handle email threads themselves, and then the recipient can decide how they want to sort it. If you're only replying to things that are specifically relevant to the section (what quoting was traditionally used for), then bottom-posting doesn't make sense.
superbatfish 7y ago
Un-un-popular opinion: Top-posting is fine. Interleaved posting is great, too. Bottom posting is idiotic.
Crinus 7y ago
> SquirrelMail I really REALLY wish they'd make a new release (there is work on still going on but the latest release is from 2013). SquirrelMail is my favorite webmail since it was first available on a shared host i used early 2000s or so. So simple and lightweight. But the lack of releases apparently made Debian to remove it, then followed by several other hosts. I could set up a VPS to have it myself but i do not really want to bother with mail administration (if anything, not wanting to bother with mail was one of the main reasons i switched to shared hosting - which initially had SquirrelMail, to my delight, but sadly got rid of it some months later).
pard68 7y ago
The claims against Protonmail and Tutanota (possibly others, but the are the two I saw) are from a place of ignorance. Both are the way the re because they are decrypted clientside. IMAP/SMTP needs a bridge or is inaccessible because of the needed decryption step.
thedz 7y ago
It's ironic to me that useplaintext.email uses formatting and design to communicate intention that would be impossible in a plaintext email
esnowrackley 7y ago
There are just different use cases for plaintext and HTML email. I can't implement plaintext only email in some environments because it just won't work with who I'm communicating with.
bitwize 7y ago
"How about you get a mail client from this century?" --Actual response I got when I complained to an IT admin at a former company that Exchange had started eating all plaintext versions of emails
tzs 7y ago
Plaintext email was doomed from the moment it got named "email" rather than "etelegram". Regular mail can include graphics, different fonts, color, bold, etc., so it is natural to expect email to handle that too. Early email systems could not, but because they ran on systems that could only display simple text, the natural assumption is that they were plain because of technological limitations. Once GUI systems became the norm, removing that limitation, it was inevitable that email would follow. This is not to say that HTML email is good. It was inevitable that email would support rich text, inline attachments, and stuff like that that, but HTML did not have to be the way that was done.
dancek 7y ago
The list of recommended mail clients had nothing for mobile. Is it because good ones don't exist? I'm a happy GMail (android+webmail) user because the usability is good enough and I don't need to install and configure stuff. If I wanted to send plaintext email from my Android phone, is there a reasonably easy and usable way to do it?
parliament32 7y ago
I use Claws Mail with the "Fancy HTML Viewer" plugin -- by default emails get rendered in plaintext but I can hit a few buttons to see the HTML version if I really need to (only happens occasionally). I only compose messages in plaintext, as do most of my coworkers, and it works great. The only thing that's still a problem is top posting... as much as I hate it, I'm not going to be That Guy and reply to a 8-email-deep 6-participant chain at the bottom.
jimnotgym 7y ago
> Notice: Use of IMAP and SMTP with Protonmail requires the use of a special third-party bridge. Protonmail is not recommended for this reason. I am a bit tired of this campaign against Protonmail by Sir_Cmpwn. Yeah you can't use SMTP directly. But if he was being objective would gmail not get a disclaimer "Google read your emails to work out what to sell you, and pass this on to government surveillance too"...Outlook is not recommended because... insert whichever gripe about protocols is on your mind.
jancsika 7y ago
> Top posting > When you reply to an email, many email clients will infer and include a quoted version of the message you're replying to above the text of your reply, or else prompt if the context is ambiguous. This is normal-- it happens in clients that conform to RFC -1 which use data gleaned from your input to prevent long email threads containing the entire history of the discussion in an increasingly long and nested footer on every email. This is called "top post prevention" and is required in all conforming clients. Please email your admin if your client doesn't conform to this specification.
unixsheikh 7y ago
I hate HTML email with a passion. In more that 20 years I cannot remember when I last saw a well marked up HTML email that wasn't miss aligned due to missing closing tags or some other stupid mistake. They are always filled with utter useless and distracting crap and for some reason people tend to think that that is better than simply focusing on the flipping point of the message. And no, I don't want people to embed screenshots in the message body, I much prefer attachments. Claws-mail has a beautiful setting called: "Render HTML messages as text", and if that doesn't work because the HTML message is too messed up -> Delete to trash! Edit: People can't figure out how to make relative well formed HTML for the browser, yet someone thought it was a good idea to introduce the mess to email. Go figure!
c-smile 7y ago
Why just only such black and white dilemma? It could be a different format altogether - something third as the golden mean. Alternatives: Markdown (we need specification for that) or HTML v2.0 or something else. Requirements to such format: - it shall provide only one way of text -> rendering and rendering -> text so WYSIWYG can be implemented in non-controversial manner. If HTML then HTML v. 2.0 as the last version that supported WYSIWYG editing (as it has no CSS). CSS is allowed to be applied by email agent application (user's theming) but not from the body of the message.
- marcthe12 7y ago
  Agree. Hyperlinks and the subset used by term emulators today. For example bold and tables can be rendered on even terminal emulators today. Another issue is probably captioning.
cedex12 7y ago
This whole discussion is making me hesitate to actually switch from plain text to html emails… unforeseen consequences!

Use plaintext email

337 points by ddevault 7y ago

joegreen 7y ago

I would like to read more details about "The former is strongly preferred". Why is plain text preferred and by whom?

jypepin 7y ago
https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext
duiker101 7y ago
I had the same reaction and at the bottom it goes more into details of the reasoning why plaintext is better. I, however disagree on pretty much all the points.
ignaloidas 7y ago
There is info about it. "4. Why is plaintext better than HTML?"
- davidcollantes 7y ago
  Yes, but some of the rationale is up to dispute, or simply out dated. For example, there is not an email client these days that do not render rich text/HTML. Those who do not, will convert it to plain text. Nothing to lose.
aloisdg 7y ago
Keep reading the article: 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. and more at https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext
- atombender 7y ago
  Is this true? All the people I interact with professionally are sending HTML email, probably because they all use Gmail.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    Sure, but are they sending it for a concious choice to prefer HTML, or because it's Gmail's default?
    - zaarn 7y ago
      Does it matter? The default is HTML, the majority of mail is HTML (or atleast multipart). So why does it matter if GMail defaults to what the majority is doing? Everyone (99.9999% of people) can receive and send HTML, so just do that, it's the informal standard for mail now.
      - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
        I think it does matter. For my rationale consult TLA.
        zaarn 7y ago
        It's great that you think that it matters but I don't think that what you think that it matters matters in practise, really, the world is HTML email now.
  - gsich 7y ago
    Do they use formatting?
    - RHSeeger 7y ago
      For myself and the people I work with, most definitely. Bold and italics in particular to highlight/accent certain parts of the text.
mrweasel 7y ago
Preferred seems like a weird claim. I would have worded it differently: >Plain text is sufficient for the vast majority of all non-advertising emails. None of the emails I receive on a daily basis needed to be HTML. The main reason for it, is allowing people to use their company logo in the footer.
throw0101a 7y ago
> Why is plain text preferred and by whom? Besides making phishing easier (by disguising links, unless you hover over them), what exactly does HTML add? Most people simply bang out a bunch of text without any formatting: what does wrapping HTML around that add? I have yet to see a layman someone add useful typographic flourishes to any business communications. Any "advanced" formatting has always come from marketers.
- esoterica 7y ago
  People use bold and italics, section headers, inline images, tables, text highlighting. The list goes on. Is it really that hard to wrap your head around the fact that formatting is useful for communication?
  - throw0101a 7y ago
    > People use [...] Not in my experience. They hit reply, type something at the top with whatever the defaults are, and hit send. > Is it really that hard to wrap your head around the fact that formatting is useful for communication? I have all of Edward Tufte's books, as well Bringhurst's Typographic Style, and Chicago: I am aware of the usefulness of typography. I simply have not seen it in my day-to-day e-mails at work or in personal life (except for marketing spams).
    - esoterica 7y ago
      I see useful text formatting every day in the emails I send and receive. A reasonable person would accept that other people’s use cases and preferences are valid instead of writing haughty diatribes about what the platonic ideal of email should look like.
      - throw0101a 7y ago
        I accept that other people's use cases and preferences differ. But given the carnage that HTML e-mail being the normal has caused in phishing and other privacy invading manners, I question whether the benefits of those use cases and preferences out-weight the detriments of the practice. Just ask John Podesta: > SecureWorks concluded Fancy Bear had sent Podesta an email on March 19, 2016, that had the appearance of a Google security alert, but actually contained a misleading link—a strategy known as spear-phishing. (This tactic has also been used by hackers to break into the accounts of other notable persons, such as Colin Powell). The link[10]—which used the URL shortening service Bitly—brought Podesta to a fake log-in page where he entered his Gmail credentials.[1][9][11][12] The email was initially sent to the IT department as it was suspected of being a fake but was described as "legitimate" in an e-mail sent by a department employee, who later said he meant to write "illegitimate".[13][14][15] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podesta_emails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podesta_emails Or countless others who have been phished.

Tomte 7y ago

Why is this a Show HN? It's just a web page, isn't it?

beefhash 7y ago
Probably because Sir_Cmpwn just made it. Considering his other e-mail-related website[1], I'd say that's why. [1] https://git-send-email.io/ https://git-send-email.io/
- Tomte 7y ago
  That's not what Show HN is for. I don't submit my articles that way. It's for things (apps etc.) you can try out. Not for essays.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    You can apply the information on this page to configuring your mail client (and should!). It's also intended to serve as a one stop resource for cataloguing plaintext support in most, if not all, mail clients, in the future.
    - Tomte 7y ago
      Still no Show HN. You've been here long enough to know that.
      - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
        Clearly I disagree. Feel free to ask the mods to clarify and update the title accordingly.
  - beefhash 7y ago
    Yeah, but you're not Sir_Cmpwn. At this point, Sir_Cmpwn is practically a celebrity here with all the perks that this entails.
- zaarn 7y ago

jve 7y ago

> Rich text features desirable for end users include things like inline images, bold or italicized text, and so on. However, the tradeoff isn't worth it. Images can simply be attached to your email, and you can employ things like asterisks, /slashes/, _underscores_, or UPPERCASE for emphasis. Well, why bother writing his own post in rich text then? He has headings, bold, links, grey font at the bottom, image. Don't get me wrong - for high security systems/environments, plaintext is way to go. For everyday life use cases I prefer html. Although with Markdown rendered text I would be pretty happy. And enough for author to cover his post sans the green/red boxes and grey text.

DarkCrusader2 7y ago
The page footer might interest you. It directly answers your question. Quoting "But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?" This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.
- jve 7y ago
  Fair. I like that minimal formatting there anyway. But often I have to communicate via email, report on complex issues, etc. It is nice to have some headings, tables, images in there.
  - DarkCrusader2 7y ago
    Agreed. As much as I like plain text email personally, having inline images etc. is really helpful sometimes.
    - mavhc 7y ago
      The key is sometimes. Plain text by default, rich text when required. Software that would strip all html out of emails for security would be handy
    - u801e 7y ago
      Before MIME was common, people used to insert uuencoded data within the email message. IIRC, certain email clients would display the decoded content inline with the surrounding text.

zaarn 7y ago

>HTML as a vector for phishing I would disagree, You can make Text-only links look fairly harmless too. The issue is more often that people do not look at all, even in text-mail, what the link points to, not that they can't see it (plus you can hover and the browser still shows the URL once you open it) >Privacy invasion and tracking Only if you use an ancient and outdated client that doesn't block external resources by default or proxies them over another server. >Mail client vulnerabilities Only an issue if the client rolls their own HTML renderer. Outlook uses the IE Trident Engine, Thunderbird uses Firefox' engine, Gmail transforms using the Chromium engine internally. That means the email client is usually as secure as the respective browser, unless you use a mail client that rolls their own engine. >HTML emails are less accessible Possibly, depends on the sender. You can make them more accessible than Text though because you can prevent the screenreader from trying to read out the link or irrelevant information. >Some clients can't display HTML emails at all Most mail clients will usually bundle a text-version of the mail, some MTAs also do this on their own. Doesn't really matter in practise since 99.99% of people use a mail client that can display HTML. It feels a bit like complaining that people on the highway drive so fast that you can't properly merge into the rightmost lane with your oldtimer car. >Rich text isn't that great, anyway And tbh, this last one basically seals it; this is a website made to rant from the personal perspective of someone who blocks mails containing any HTML from their services and has quite the history of throwing people using their lib under the bus over personal preferences. I don't see how any of this is relevant when even the site itself admits that using a multipart mail with both text and HTML is sufficient, why should I even begin to send plaintext instead of doing that? Unless your mailclient is garbage, it handles multipart and will understand the mail.

e12e 7y ago
>> Some clients can't display HTML emails at all > Most mail clients will usually bundle a text-version of the mail, some MTAs also do this on their own. This assumes there is a proper text part (one that actually includes the content of the mail body).
- naikrovek 7y ago
  That does not seem like much of an assumption; all modern mail clients that I am aware of do this.

owenmarshall 7y ago

I’d love someone to convince me I’m wrong - but I think we’ve lost this fight. Years of use of plaintext hostile clients by people who read our emails means bottom posting or inline replies are seen as extremely strange, and impossible when you have one of those “seven email deep” threads forwarded to you. (I know, I know, “snip it down”, but sometimes I just don’t have those minutes in my day ;)) Wrapping as well has given me trouble - I'm not sure what I settled on but I went through a period of having some users see my emails come across poorly formatted. And to that note, IIRC Outlook doesn’t do a passable job with plaintext mail, instead shoving monotype text in an ugly system font. The last time I checked I don’t think it converted > into quoting and just vomited them up. I don’t know what the solution is beyond reluctantly accepting that we have to both consume AND produce HTML email now, and make tools that do it gracefully.

gpapilion 7y ago
I would agree I gave this fight up sometime in early 2000s. Since email is only valuable as a network, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me to constantly argue with colleagues to send plain text + html, let alone to only send plain text. Ultimately, I decided using elm was my issue, and they were doing the natural thing.
superkuh 7y ago
There's no losing as long as you're being the change you want to see. I will always send plaintext emails and I have the technical skill to dig into the raw email and decode the encoded HTML data manually or rip out the relevant authorization URL/strings.
- owenmarshall 7y ago
  You’ve just made the problem an externality. While you have the skill and desire to do that - and to be clear, as a mu user I do the same dance when I need - inbound messages are rarely the problem for me. What is a problem is outbound messages. When I try to do (what I think is) the right thing and trim the message and reply inline or bottom post, confusion abounds. I’ve had messages missed because the recipients told me they thought I accidentally sent an empty reply and didn’t scroll past the “on July 24th, superkuh wrote:” Whose fault is that? Is it the 20 people on the distribution list who learned email protocol from years of Outlook and not “the right places?” I don’t feel comfortable pushing that blame onto them.

wongarsu 7y ago

The page is about setting up email clients to send plain text emails, but most of the reasons given why plaintext is preferable are about receiving email. The remaining reasons are either "rich text isn't that great" or are trivially solved by the client (extracting plain text from a rich text email isn't hard on non-marketing emails).

beefhash 7y ago

For the convenience of anyone that may consider licensing and language it's written in a relevant part of their choice of software, here's the list of recommended e-mail clients in the submission with licensing and programming language info: - aerc: MIT, Go - alpine: Apache 2.0 (parts 4-clause BSD), C - claws mail: GPLv3, C - Gnus: LGPLv2+, elisp - KMail: GPLv2 (parts GFDLv1.2, parts LGPLv2.1), C++ - mutt: GPLv2, C - SquirrelMail: GPLv2, PHP Side note: > (context: ProtonMail) It's also recommended that you visit Settings → Account → Identity and remove the default email signature. It bears noting that free accounts on ProtonMail cannot remove the ProtonMail advertisement in the signature, cf. [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/5ageqz/question_about_protonmail_signature/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/5ageqz/question...

erk__ 7y ago
I would also reccoment Wanderlust [0]: GPLv2+, elisp [0]: https://github.com/wanderlust/wanderlust https://github.com/wanderlust/wanderlust
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Can you fill out this survey for me? https://paste.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/be4f2eee45046e069a4bb175d9d5395e9c79baeb https://paste.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/be4f2eee45046e069a4bb175d9d539...
stevekemp 7y ago
My own client: lumail, c++, gpl https://github.com/lumail/lumail https://github.com/lumail/lumail
- Boulth 7y ago
  It would be great if you inserted a screenshot of your client in action in the README.md. In my experience screenshots have excellent information density when it comes to evaluating software :)
  - 7y ago

davidcollantes 7y ago

I was always a strong advocate for plain text emails. Because for many years my mail client was Mutt, I saw everything plain text. Now that clients are graphical, it bothers me to know others might be reading my plain text emails with a "Times New Roman" font, and not a monospaced (as god intended it to be). So, to avoid that, I use HTML on my emails. Yes, it makes them a bit bigger. Yes, they go against my very belief. Yet, they look like I want them to be seeing.

ignaloidas 7y ago
Have you thought that others may not want to see your emails as you intended?
- davidcollantes 7y ago
  End recipients can always overwrite, no?
  - ignaloidas 7y ago
    overwriting HTML styles is harder than setting how to format plaintext. HTML styling has order of magnitude more customization options than plaintext, which has three that I can think of: font, font size, tab width. Almost all clients have customization for plaintext, I haven't seen one that can override HTML customizations.

atombender 7y ago

The problems with HTML email originate in the days when clients like Outlook would produce horrendous, non-responsive HTML that were basically entire embedded web pages; the idea that the sender should be able to dictate the font of an email is a bit ridiculous, not to mention the layout, and the result was often broken depending on the email client. Emails aren't web pages, but they do benefit from formatting (bold, italics, links, paragraphs), all of which lead to better emails overall. After all, everyone has their plaintext style (asterisks for emphasis, or maybe underscores, etc.) and HTML formalizes those conventions in a way that has been standard for decades and even centuries if you consider typesetting in general. I like the idea of HTML email better than I like the implementation. I'd love to see a minimal HTML subset that only included formatting (including paragraphs, indentation and blockquoting), images and links. No tables, no box model, fonts or styling. We can keep full HTML for fancy marketing emails, but letter-form email should be simple and impossible to abuse. These days, of course, most email is HTML simply because that's the default for almost all email apps (Gmail, Outlook, Spark, Polymail, etc.). It's not true that only marketing emails use HTML, as the author claims.

virtualritz 7y ago
"After all, everyone has their plaintext style" This is counter to my own experience. I am using (plain text) email since 27 years. Including inline quoting and avoiding top posting at all costs. People used bold (not sure how to render a '*' in HN) /italic/ and _underscore_ consistently on lists, newsgroups and -- rarely, as seldomly needed -- in private correspondence. I learned how to do this by example. Everyone being very disciplined about this in the 90's still. This started deteriorating rapidly in the wake of eternal September [1] and Outlook becoming the standard client in the corporate world, using HTML as default. Personally I blame Outlook for HTML email hell foremost. It is very simple to display plain text email, omitting aforementioned formatters and applying them. The same goes for displaying in a proportional font (detecting intended indentations from the original and replicating them with tabs, on the fly). Using such formatters is just another (and not even alien) form of inline markup. Actually the very one that inspired markdown, ReST, etc. The only reason people use HTML email is that it's the default. Not that it's better in any way. The average user simply doesn't know any better. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

alphagrep12345 7y ago

If you block remote image loading (to thwart trackers) and be careful about phishing links, I don't see a need for plain text-only email.

u801e 7y ago
Most people aren't going to change the default configuration of their email client or use caution when dealing with phishing emails. But if the email is plain text, then that's not an issue.

rhabarba 7y ago

I consider support for HTML e-mails which is enabled by default a major bug in a mail client.

jraph 7y ago

Some people sending plain text mails also wrap them manually. If my window is small (maybe because I am using a small screen), the text is painful to read. And a non manually wrapped plain text is not wrapped at all in some cases. By all means, send me plain text mails, it will be lighter for my self-hosted inbox, but don't wrap them manually. If you are going to abuse /this/ kind of `formatting`, however, you are making your mail harder to read for me. These are tags anyway, just not HTML tags. I'd prefer you use the real formatting that is correctly handled in most cases, but I will adapt. > There are two main types of emails on the internet: plaintext and HTML. The former is strongly preferred You will need to back this up because this is not what I observe. My email client takes care of my privacy and my security, and you can use it too if you are concerned, it's a cross platform maintained free software. It's okay. My problems with HTML emails is colors: if you want to use something like a night mode, you will see emails with hard coded white background and black texts, or worse, only black texts. You may be able to ignore colors but people will assume you can see them. Maybe an extension like dark background on light texts when using a browser for reading emails who do the trick, but I don't.

bo1024 7y ago
I'm very sad about manual line wrapping too (since I love plain text otherwise), but unfortunately it's in the MIME standard. > Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF. Of course with HTML, your source code can adhere to this standard while still having arbitrarily long lines of text... https://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html https://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html
- jorangreef 7y ago
  The RFC you quoted actually refers to line lengths within a MIME message as a whole (headers and body), and only after Content-Transfer-Encoding has been applied, not before. In other words, your text parts can have lines of arbitrary line length, provided you encode them as QuotedPrintable or Base64 and set the Content-Transfer-Encoding header accordingly, which most email clients do.

Hitton 7y ago

The part about ProtonMail and Tutanota seems pretty biased. I would like to hear how the author suggests that they should implement IMAP and SMTP without compromising the encryption. It sounds like the author prefers dubious advantages to real improved security. That's quite ridiculous considering that according to him HTML emails are: >"... a security nightmare, are mostly used for advertising to you and tracking you, are less accessible for many users, and don't offer anything especially great for it."

ignaloidas 7y ago
For Protonmail: maybe using PGP and sending over TLS?? Protonmail bridge basically does this, just over a proprietary protocol.
Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
I'm on mobile so I can't give you an adequte response, but I can link you to a previous commment I wrote on the subject... Or I would, but pasting seems to be broken on my phone as well. If anyone can search HN for "Sir_Cmpwn Protonmail" and link the relevant comment I'd appreciate it very much.
- bandali 7y ago
  This one, I believe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008123
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    Thank you!
bjpbakker 7y ago
> the author prefers dubious advantages to real improved security Encrypting the data transfer doesn’t improve any of the HTML email security issues. So I fail to see how that would be “real improved security”. But I do share the authors sentiment on the failure to not using open standards of both Protonmail and Tutanota. So maybe I’m biased.

ThinkBeat 7y ago

He forgot about the even worse AMP emails that come out now.

mlang23 7y ago

This belongs in my ~/.signature

yyyk 7y ago

Plaintext email is really troublesome if one wants to mail in an right-to-left language. There's simply no compatible way to override the direction/embedding without HTML * , so content is often scrambled. Many mailers won't even align to right automatically if all input is in an right-to-left language. In practice, HTML email is the only compatible way to get a semi-decent experience for these languages. * To answer the obvious: the unicode bidi override characters are not a solution. They are often stripped out, and editing zero-width characters is a very 'pleasant' experience.

gmueckl 7y ago
Where are these characters stripped out? I can see that these create security issues with urls that get rendered with changed field order to look benign.
- yyyk 7y ago
  I meant stripped from the mail body - though I suspect these programs would also strip them out of the other fields (I haven't checked that). In general, working with zero-width characters is a bad idea from both security and usability POV and is not a practical solution. The result is that the only reasonable and compatible way to mix LTR (left-to-right, like English) and RTL (right-to-left, as with ME languages) is with HTML email. Note that in most cases rendering is an LTR context, so even sending RTL on its own will fare poorly.
cik 7y ago
I came here to say exactly this. It's even harder for the real right-to-left use in the ones I speak, where we frequently mix Hebrew/Arabic with English, for using certain words that just don't exist. Plaintext mailers completely mangle emails like this, making them beyond unreadable. Mutt to its credit does the best job.

mgulick 7y ago

I'm surprised by the recommendation to use format=flowed. I set up thunderbird a while back to use the recommendations from the LKML: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/email-clients.html#email-clients https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/email-clients.... Doesn't format=flowed mangle patches? I've also disabled wrapping (as recommended in that document), however I'm not a big fan of it. I do think that plain text wrapped at 72 or 80 characters looks much nicer. I wish thunderbird allowed me to select portions of the text to wrap, or to disable wrapping for selected portions (e.g. a code snippet). Is this handled better in other email clients?

ignaloidas 7y ago
Now that page recommends using git send-email, on which the author also made a tutorial: https://git-send-email.io https://git-send-email.io
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Thanks for the link - this is indeed my stance, I don't think people should be pasting patches into their daily MUA.
  - Boulth 7y ago
    That should be highlighted more. Not using git sendmail is the problem, not format=flowed.
cpbotha 7y ago
If you do format=flowed correctly, then code is not mangled. However, there is a higher risk (than with hard-wrapped) that users can mangle code with format=flowed.
- u801e 7y ago
  I think it comes down to a lack of flexibility with the MUA composer. If you're using an editor like vim to compose the email, it would be easy enough to read the patch into the message by running :r file-containing-patch And then visually highlighting text and running: :'<,'>s/$/\s/ to append whitespace to lines you don't want to be hard-wrapped in clients that support format=flowed

tqwhite 7y ago

What a load of bollocks. The arguments against come down to, 'you are an idiot who can't figure out phishing links' and, well, that's it. Something about marketing emails. Stupid. Luddite. I'm surprised they don't insist you use a monospace type face in your email reader to give it that late eighties feel. I have always used HTML email, even when it was new and poorly supported. I want people who read my email to see a nice appearance. I like bold face and sometimes images. "Strongly preferred". An appeal to the Authority Fallacy is an indication of a weak argument. Or, no argument at all.

owenmarshall 7y ago
I think this opinion is strongly worded and might get some heat, but I think you touch on something important. Plaintext email often serves as an in group shibboleth to distinguish “us” from “the other lusers”. Does it have merit beyond that, or do these articles just reinforce that?
- mbreese 7y ago
  I think the main issue at play here is quoting. In particular, how bad rich text/html mail programs are at dealing with inline quoting. In my opinion, that’s the main “feature” of email communication that has been lost over the years. On the top replies make it difficult to follow a nested thread of emails. If html email clients handled this better, I don’t think there would be as much of a problem. I think you’re right though that plain text acts as a bit of a shibboleth to differentiate “advanced” users vs luddites. But the main thing that I’ve heard people complain about with respect to html email is the loss of inline quoting. Plaintext has its issues too— in particular long line soft wrapping. Which some would argue would be better supported if html email hadn’t become so popular.
  - tln 7y ago
    I absolutely agree -- the aspect of email I miss from the good ol' days was well-trimmed replies and doing so inline. Threaded inboxes and smart trimming helps, but not completely. However I think that HTML clients handle this well enough but the etiquette has been completely lost. Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. > Why is top-posting such a bad thing? >> Top-posting. >>> What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

eythian 7y ago

This ship has long ago sailed. People are using email less and less these days as it is, anyway. I get personal emails less than once a week now. You'd be better off pushing people to using email for communication in place of walled-garden IM or social platform du jour (which I also think will be a losing battle in general, but perhaps more worthwhile), in which case being able to make your email look nicer might even be a draw.

tjoff 7y ago

Not having inline images is an issue though. It helps immensely with readability and usability. Especially with people that aren't as computer-savvy. Partly because many email-clients will list attachments below the mail content. And since it is standard practice to include the previous mail when responding you have to scroll a kilometer to get to the bottom with the attached images. That is just unusable. Yes, it is an issue with bad clients and not plaintext. But nonetheless it is a big issue.

kungtotte 7y ago
Maybe you should read the entire page? It specifically warns against top posting and quoting the entire email you're replying to. So if people followed this advice you wouldn't have to scroll a kilometer for attachments (unless someone actually wrote an email that long).
- tjoff 7y ago
  I don't know if I've ever seen bottom-posting in my life. They have particular weak arguments against that as well. It is very useful when forwarding a message or including someone else as cc.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    When forwarding a message you should include the thread as RFC 2822 attachments (RFC number recited from memory, may be wrong). Your mail client should make this easy for you.
  - scbrg 7y ago
    It is very useful for you, the sender. It is a nightmare for the receiver. Whenever I receive one of those forwarded top posted thirty mail long horrors I just ignore everything and hope I can guess context from whatever you wrote in the last email. The alternative is to spend an hour deciphering the blob of goo that is actual mail messages mixed with signatures, attachments, all being meaningless replies to questions I haven't yet read - because top posting. Sending me such a thing is equivalent to telling me "Fuck you, your time is worth nothing to me."

tyingq 7y ago

The issue here is that most people looking for plain text email want to receive plain text email. These instructions really only help you to send plain text email. It's unclear if the receivers care either way. I am sympathetic to the issues around HTML email but it's a hard ship to turn.

moonrider 7y ago

I think this is unfortunately mostly preaching to the choir. The "industry" is moving in the opposite direction - the page should have a section on "AMP for email".

upofadown 7y ago

>Mail client vulnerabilities Yeah, this is the part that is eventually going to bite us ... hard. It is just straight up insane to allow random entities access to the vast attack surface of a web browser. Unfortunately no one seems to even care about present day ongoing attacks. We will have to wait until someone comes up with a worm that takes down email and possibly the whole net.

jorangreef 7y ago
MIME is hard enough: https://snyk.io/blog/how-to-crash-an-email-server-with-a-single-email/ https://snyk.io/blog/how-to-crash-an-email-server-with-a-sin...

jedicoffee 7y ago

Drew, no. - Will

ubermonkey 7y ago

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. It's done. I'm not going back to plaintext, and I can't imagine most people will, either. There's no good reason to (in particular, the downfalls of HTML the author lists are all either easily solved or are issues orthogonal to the format of the email.)

bachmeier 7y ago
> There's no good reason to I used html for years. Once my email volume reached a certain point, I went back to plain text because I can read it and respond to it much faster.
- josho 7y ago
  Neither you nor the poster provide a reason why. Why is it better? How does plain text make it faster to respond? Or even faster to read?
  - zepolen 7y ago
    images loading..2% images loading..15% images loading..29% images loading..42% images loading..58% images loading..74% images loading..89% images loading..100% ____________________________________ | | | O O | | O | | \_/ | | MY LOGO | | My catchphrase | | | | | | | |------------------------------------| | | | Hi josho! | | | | This is why it's slower to read! | | | |____________________________________|

gdfasfklshg4 7y ago

Does anyone else hate when someone assumes their screenwidth and hard wraps at 72 characters?

yakubin 7y ago
For me it's not about the screen width. It's simply unergonomic to read wide lines of text. Ever wondered why book pages are vertically-oriented? I don't want my eyes to run a marathon from left to right with each line of text.

ksahin 7y ago

> HTML emails are mainly used for marketing - that is, emails you probably don't want to see in the first place Wait what? Maybe you're subscribed to the wrong newsletter, but in my case, I'm subscribed to products / brand I like, I'm aware that I will receive advertisement / product updates and I'm fine with it !

omaranto 7y ago

It seems to me this webpage uses "bottom-posting" to include both what Wikipedia [1] calls bottom-posting and what it calls interleaved posting or inline replying. For example, in the section called "Top posting", the webpage advises you to "Write anything you have to say underneath the quote it pertains to.", which is interleaved posting (unless you only quote one thing). Is this abuse of language common? Am I actually on the side of bottom-posters because they really mean "write anything you have to say underneath the quote it pertains to" rather than "reply to everything at the bottom"? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style

masukomi 7y ago

I just want to put it out there, that regardless of if this is a "fight worth fighting" or not. Email was a nightmare for me. I could not keep up. Coworkers would catch themselves and laugh when they asked if I'd gotten an email. Switching to neomutt has changed everything for me. I now mmaintain Inbox Zero. I write in markdown. I convert it into a multipart email with HTML in one keystroke for everyone else. Other benefits: I don't know this for a fact, but i suspect that HTML email has got to _suck_ for visually impaired people using screen readers. plaintext email means no tracking by marketers, or facebook, or anyone else. plaintext emails are also _way_ shorter. There is so much less crap to mentally deal with when all the marketing BS has been stripped away. plaintext emails give you a glimpse into just how much you're tracked too. Nevermind the privacy aspects of seeing the real url, you see that the "real" url is multiple lines long because of all the tracking they've embedded in it. It makes you think twice before clicking it.

tomjen3 7y ago
What is it about neomutt that allows you to be that efficient with your emails?
- benoliver999 7y ago
  For me it's not mutt so much as being able to write and edit in vim. I can reply in-line, quickly chop out chunks of text etc etc. I'm not one to shout at people for not using plain text etc but I personally quite like it.

camillomiller 7y ago

The attitude of high-skilled tech people to think that their stripped down, interface-less, and brutalist version of something has to be simply better than anything else needs its own German term, something like Schadenfreude or Treppenwitz. I'm sure some of the German readers here can work out something.

t0astbread 7y ago
Isn't that just elitism/gatekeeping? Other than that "Hackerwahn" ("hacker mania") sounds like a nice term for this as mostly low-level hackers seem to show this kind of behavior. (Note: This is not meant as an insult or a generalization.)
yakubin 7y ago
Yeah, you really have to be a high-skilled h@x0r to write a plain text mail. /s

yoz-y 7y ago

Who does this page cater to though? The recommended tools are programs that are packaged for Linux or need compiling[1]. If they want to convince anybody who already does not prefer plaintext then they should be targeting the Windows and macOS crowd. [1]: Later some tools such as thunderbird or configuration for Apple Mail and Gmail are mentioned. They should be top and center.

arbuge 7y ago

One interesting anecdote about plain text not being the default in most popular email clients come from my own PublicEmails.com email-to-blog-post project. People would experiment with it and the allowed list of HTML tags for formatting (https://publicemails.com/blog/display/772/37f6f81d9a https://publicemails.com/blog/display/772/37f6f81d9a) but would get confused when the tags would render verbatim instead of being processed correctly. They didn't realize they were in HTML mode by default in most email clients like Gmail, and that they would have to manually switch back to plain text if they wanted to use HTML tags. I ended up adding a question to the FAQ to address this issue specifically, though people still get confused from time to time. There is a touch of irony about it - to get HTML tags to work, you have to be in plain text, not HTML mode. Once you're in HTML mode all that's needed for formatting is the client's own formatting controls.

pcunite 7y ago

Is it not ironic that the very website promoting the benefits of plain text, uses a textual medium consisting of bold, underlined, colorized, and other font effects? Something that can only be achieved via HTML enhanced emails!

ignaloidas 7y ago
I think footer text might interest you: > "But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?" >This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.

vbezhenar 7y ago

Thanks, I apparently found out that Claws Mail had Windows version. Default Windows E-mail client does not support text mode at all and I prefer text mode, so I'll try it.

NoGravitas 7y ago

I'd like to see formatting for email that doesn't have the security and privacy vulnerabilities and complexity of HTML email. Markdown would be fine. Inline images can refer only to attachments in the same message, not to arbitrary URLs. Maybe some restrictions on links to reduce their effectiveness in phishing emails. It would be fine. It would be everything you actually need.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> I'd like to see formatting for email that doesn't have the security and privacy vulnerabilities and complexity of HTML email. Markdown would be fine Markdown supports arbitrary HTML, and so has exactly the privacy and security implications of HTML (though there extensions available which limit this, and are standard in some markdown processors and expected by default in some markdown variants.)
- NoGravitas 7y ago
  Okay, to be pedantic, I mean a subset of Markdown that doesn't allow arbitrary HTML, and may have additional restrictions of the types I mentioned.

hesk 7y ago

I greatly prefer top posting because it emphasizes what I'm looking for in a email reply which is new information. Moreover, modern email clients automatically hide the quoted text so only the reply, with the new information, is visible but context is available if necessary. For example: --- Let's meet at 8 pm. (Show more from person A). --- Typically, the context will be clear from reading the reply and the sender. If not, I can establish context by clicking on the link: --- Let's meet at 8 pm. > Agreed, when should we meet? >> I think we should meet face-to-face to discuss this. >>> This is a super-important discussion. >>>> I propose to implement HTML mails. >>>>> Plaintext mails suck. I missed important information because the mail used asterisks instead of bold text. --- With top posting, I can stop reading the previous mails as soon as I understand what's going on. Consider the opposite with bottom posting: Here I would have to read the entire context from the beginning or am at the mercy of how other people edited the context. EDIT: Put --- on individual lines. Fixed asterisks formatting.

frenchyatwork 7y ago
That's only relevant because you're including your whole thread (or part of it, if there's forks) in your email. As far as I know, there's no real reason for people to do this anymore. Email clients should be able to handle email threads themselves, and then the recipient can decide how they want to sort it. If you're only replying to things that are specifically relevant to the section (what quoting was traditionally used for), then bottom-posting doesn't make sense.

superbatfish 7y ago

Un-un-popular opinion: Top-posting is fine. Interleaved posting is great, too. Bottom posting is idiotic.

Crinus 7y ago

> SquirrelMail I really REALLY wish they'd make a new release (there is work on still going on but the latest release is from 2013). SquirrelMail is my favorite webmail since it was first available on a shared host i used early 2000s or so. So simple and lightweight. But the lack of releases apparently made Debian to remove it, then followed by several other hosts. I could set up a VPS to have it myself but i do not really want to bother with mail administration (if anything, not wanting to bother with mail was one of the main reasons i switched to shared hosting - which initially had SquirrelMail, to my delight, but sadly got rid of it some months later).

pard68 7y ago

The claims against Protonmail and Tutanota (possibly others, but the are the two I saw) are from a place of ignorance. Both are the way the re because they are decrypted clientside. IMAP/SMTP needs a bridge or is inaccessible because of the needed decryption step.

thedz 7y ago

It's ironic to me that useplaintext.email uses formatting and design to communicate intention that would be impossible in a plaintext email

esnowrackley 7y ago

There are just different use cases for plaintext and HTML email. I can't implement plaintext only email in some environments because it just won't work with who I'm communicating with.

bitwize 7y ago

"How about you get a mail client from this century?" --Actual response I got when I complained to an IT admin at a former company that Exchange had started eating all plaintext versions of emails

tzs 7y ago

Plaintext email was doomed from the moment it got named "email" rather than "etelegram". Regular mail can include graphics, different fonts, color, bold, etc., so it is natural to expect email to handle that too. Early email systems could not, but because they ran on systems that could only display simple text, the natural assumption is that they were plain because of technological limitations. Once GUI systems became the norm, removing that limitation, it was inevitable that email would follow. This is not to say that HTML email is good. It was inevitable that email would support rich text, inline attachments, and stuff like that that, but HTML did not have to be the way that was done.

dancek 7y ago

The list of recommended mail clients had nothing for mobile. Is it because good ones don't exist? I'm a happy GMail (android+webmail) user because the usability is good enough and I don't need to install and configure stuff. If I wanted to send plaintext email from my Android phone, is there a reasonably easy and usable way to do it?

parliament32 7y ago

I use Claws Mail with the "Fancy HTML Viewer" plugin -- by default emails get rendered in plaintext but I can hit a few buttons to see the HTML version if I really need to (only happens occasionally). I only compose messages in plaintext, as do most of my coworkers, and it works great. The only thing that's still a problem is top posting... as much as I hate it, I'm not going to be That Guy and reply to a 8-email-deep 6-participant chain at the bottom.

jimnotgym 7y ago

> Notice: Use of IMAP and SMTP with Protonmail requires the use of a special third-party bridge. Protonmail is not recommended for this reason. I am a bit tired of this campaign against Protonmail by Sir_Cmpwn. Yeah you can't use SMTP directly. But if he was being objective would gmail not get a disclaimer "Google read your emails to work out what to sell you, and pass this on to government surveillance too"...Outlook is not recommended because... insert whichever gripe about protocols is on your mind.

jancsika 7y ago

> Top posting > When you reply to an email, many email clients will infer and include a quoted version of the message you're replying to above the text of your reply, or else prompt if the context is ambiguous. This is normal-- it happens in clients that conform to RFC -1 which use data gleaned from your input to prevent long email threads containing the entire history of the discussion in an increasingly long and nested footer on every email. This is called "top post prevention" and is required in all conforming clients. Please email your admin if your client doesn't conform to this specification.

unixsheikh 7y ago

I hate HTML email with a passion. In more that 20 years I cannot remember when I last saw a well marked up HTML email that wasn't miss aligned due to missing closing tags or some other stupid mistake. They are always filled with utter useless and distracting crap and for some reason people tend to think that that is better than simply focusing on the flipping point of the message. And no, I don't want people to embed screenshots in the message body, I much prefer attachments. Claws-mail has a beautiful setting called: "Render HTML messages as text", and if that doesn't work because the HTML message is too messed up -> Delete to trash! Edit: People can't figure out how to make relative well formed HTML for the browser, yet someone thought it was a good idea to introduce the mess to email. Go figure!

c-smile 7y ago

Why just only such black and white dilemma? It could be a different format altogether - something third as the golden mean. Alternatives: Markdown (we need specification for that) or HTML v2.0 or something else. Requirements to such format: - it shall provide only one way of text -> rendering and rendering -> text so WYSIWYG can be implemented in non-controversial manner. If HTML then HTML v. 2.0 as the last version that supported WYSIWYG editing (as it has no CSS). CSS is allowed to be applied by email agent application (user's theming) but not from the body of the message.

marcthe12 7y ago
Agree. Hyperlinks and the subset used by term emulators today. For example bold and tables can be rendered on even terminal emulators today. Another issue is probably captioning.

cedex12 7y ago

This whole discussion is making me hesitate to actually switch from plain text to html emails… unforeseen consequences!