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Hi Fellow HN'ers, Author here. Happy to answer any questions or comments. ---- If you don't mind me hijacking the conversation, I'd like to pose two questio

Hi Fellow HN'ers, Author here. Happy to answer any questions or comments. ---- If you don't mind me hijacking the conversation, I'd like to pose two questions to HN: > Alternatively, I considered calling it ‘UntrackMe: Remove tracking from email newsletters’. Which sounds better? and > I don’t know if it’s worth the effort to do this. Do many people still read emails in plain text? What do you guys think? Thanks for reading!

upofadown 6y ago
Privacy is a hot topic right now. Most just turn off the loading of remote assets in HTML emails but there is a certain simplicity to just reading the text. Just today I provided some suggestions to someone on plain text oriented email clients. As for myself, the issue has never really come up as I have used Mutt since forever. The w3m browser does a great job of converting stuff like HTML tables to well formatted plain text for those times where the text is unreadable or missing. Which raises the question of why that could not work for the newsletter generators. Is the starting HTML really that bad?
- bengtan 6y ago
  Thanks for your feedback. > Is the starting HTML really that bad? I think the mailing list service providers just don't care. If they did, they would easily see that extremely long blocks of random text (ie. a link) in plain text kills the readability.
abhinav22 6y ago
If you can get untrack.me as a domain then you are golden! Regardless, I think untrackme is more suitable in today’s vernacular. Many people read emails in plain text and I think a lot of people would like to prevent tracking, but without resorting to plain text. Which your app does. Only issue I see is that this something that should be directly integrated into email clients, not something I would get a third party app for (how do we trust you to forward emails to - I wouldn’t for work purposes, but would definitely consider for personal purposes). The bigger issue is not so much tracking but spam in email inboxes from newsletters and other email blasts from distribution lists. I really liked your clean site and easy to read instructions.
- bengtan 6y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. > Only issue I see is that this something that should be directly integrated into email clients, not something I would get a third party app for I agree that it would be better integrated as part of an email client. But that's nothing something I can do. So I'm trying to do the next best thing. > (how do we trust you to forward emails to - I wouldn’t for work purposes, but would definitely consider for personal purposes). I agree about the trust issue as well. Which is why I say ... only send publicly available email newsletters. I don't expect people to forward private/confidential emails. Nor do I want them to.

upofadown 6y ago

Privacy is a hot topic right now. Most just turn off the loading of remote assets in HTML emails but there is a certain simplicity to just reading the text. Just today I provided some suggestions to someone on plain text oriented email clients. As for myself, the issue has never really come up as I have used Mutt since forever. The w3m browser does a great job of converting stuff like HTML tables to well formatted plain text for those times where the text is unreadable or missing. Which raises the question of why that could not work for the newsletter generators. Is the starting HTML really that bad?

bengtan 6y ago
Thanks for your feedback. > Is the starting HTML really that bad? I think the mailing list service providers just don't care. If they did, they would easily see that extremely long blocks of random text (ie. a link) in plain text kills the readability.

abhinav22 6y ago

If you can get untrack.me as a domain then you are golden! Regardless, I think untrackme is more suitable in today’s vernacular. Many people read emails in plain text and I think a lot of people would like to prevent tracking, but without resorting to plain text. Which your app does. Only issue I see is that this something that should be directly integrated into email clients, not something I would get a third party app for (how do we trust you to forward emails to - I wouldn’t for work purposes, but would definitely consider for personal purposes). The bigger issue is not so much tracking but spam in email inboxes from newsletters and other email blasts from distribution lists. I really liked your clean site and easy to read instructions.

bengtan 6y ago
Thanks for the feedback. > Only issue I see is that this something that should be directly integrated into email clients, not something I would get a third party app for I agree that it would be better integrated as part of an email client. But that's nothing something I can do. So I'm trying to do the next best thing. > (how do we trust you to forward emails to - I wouldn’t for work purposes, but would definitely consider for personal purposes). I agree about the trust issue as well. Which is why I say ... only send publicly available email newsletters. I don't expect people to forward private/confidential emails. Nor do I want them to.