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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 bo

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.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    > 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:" A common way to handle this when writing to people who aren't likely to expect an inline response is to put "Responses inline below:" at the very beginning, and then respond inline as usual.
  - u801e 7y ago
    I'll admit that, in the past, I passively-agressively did things like respond to emails inline and then use my editor to remove all quoted text before sending my reply.

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.
- jefftk 7y ago
  > 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:" A common way to handle this when writing to people who aren't likely to expect an inline response is to put "Responses inline below:" at the very beginning, and then respond inline as usual.
- u801e 7y ago
  I'll admit that, in the past, I passively-agressively did things like respond to emails inline and then use my editor to remove all quoted text before sending my reply.