3 ms·
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 wi
by 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 agoWhere 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 agoI 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 agoI 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.