3 ms·

I very strongly do not want HTML email to come back. I consider the dominance of plaintext email to be a victory, let's not concede it. HTML email was quite pop

by city41 15y ago

I very strongly do not want HTML email to come back. I consider the dominance of plaintext email to be a victory, let's not concede it. HTML email was quite popular in the mid to late nineties and it was a disaster. Why do we want messages to go from 600 bytes to 30k? Why do we want readability of the message to be determined by either the sender's sense of design and/or our client's capabilities? Why do we want to make email threads that much more difficult to to create and follow? It's bad enough we've succumbed to top posting, I can't even imagine what the size and readability of an HTML email that has been replied to 20+ times would be. Please, let's stick with plaintext.

jarin 15y ago
While we're at it let's get rid of streaming HD video and all that cumbersome CSS and Javascript (it just slows down page load times, and why should websites be dictated by the owner's sense of design?).
- city41 15y ago
  The website analogy is pretty poor. How many websites today aren't designed by professional designers? When you hand the design reins to everyone, you end up with Myspace profiles and Geocities sites. There's nothing wrong with either of those, but context is essential. When I'm reading through dozens and even hundreds of emails a day that are crucial to my daily work, I really don't want to have to deal with Paula's pink hearts theme or Bill's Boston Bruins theme. There's a time and place for everything. I do want confidence that I can read my emails quickly and easily, and plaintext makes that promise a lot better than HTML does.
  - glhaynes 15y ago
    If the problem is reading speed, most email clients can suppress images unless the user specifically requests them to be shown.
  - jarin 15y ago
    That's exactly the reason emails come in two parts (text and HTML). You can tell your client to only show plaintext emails if you're so inclined (just like you can tell Firefox to only use your own personal stylesheet). Personally, I prefer the HTML emails and find them faster to go through. It takes me about 2 seconds to skim a Thinkgeek mailer with product images and see if there's anything interesting, vs. having to actually read the entire email and click a bunch of links. Then there are all the nice graphs and colors in the server monitoring emails I get that let me get a big picture overview of the server farm health at a glance every week. If I see any red or too many spikes, I can decide whether to investigate further or get back to coding. For all the benefits I get from HTML email, I'll risk the small chance that getting an email with Paula's pink hearts theme will seriously fuck up my day.
    - city41 15y ago
      Not all HTML messages include a text section. I just looked at the raw message of 6 HTML emails and only two of them had multipart/alternative sections. But if it could be agreed upon to always send both, I think that would be good. And for sure, you do make some good points on where HTML email can be a good thing. Perhaps I'm being too pessimistic.
      - deadcyclo 15y ago
        That's my beef with them too. I prefer text emails, since I do a lot of my email reading on the CLI. It's true, and annoying, that a fair amount don't include multipart/alternative sections. For me it's not a huge problem as I have plugins that will extract the text from the HTML and present the text only, but it's not exactly a great reader experience. Much much worse, however, are all of the people/companies that include multipart/alternative sections, but do it completely wrong: "This is an HTML-email. Your client lacks HTML support. Please visit [url here] to view this email" or even worse "This is an HTML-email. Your client lacks HTML support. Please upgrade your software". I come across these almost daily, and it bugs the hell out of me. Unless it is something very important (bill, sign-up email, etc.) I simply ignore these emails, and they never get read. (Yes, it really is out of spite. I'll ignore them when reading email in a web client or on my phone later. They simply lost their chance) I don't really like HTML mail, but I can live with it. I see the reason why it exists (great for advertisement). However, if you use HTML email, do include multipart/alternative section for non-HTML clients, and include the same information there, non of this "your client can't handle HTML, you loose crap".
glhaynes 15y ago
I'll come right out and say it: I don't care if emails are 30k a piece instead of 600 bytes. Maybe I'm "part of the problem", but so is 98% of the rest of the users of the internet. I simply don't care because it has essentially zero material effect on me. My phone doesn't even sweat under that load.

by city41 15y ago

jarin 15y ago

While we're at it let's get rid of streaming HD video and all that cumbersome CSS and Javascript (it just slows down page load times, and why should websites be dictated by the owner's sense of design?).

city41 15y ago
The website analogy is pretty poor. How many websites today aren't designed by professional designers? When you hand the design reins to everyone, you end up with Myspace profiles and Geocities sites. There's nothing wrong with either of those, but context is essential. When I'm reading through dozens and even hundreds of emails a day that are crucial to my daily work, I really don't want to have to deal with Paula's pink hearts theme or Bill's Boston Bruins theme. There's a time and place for everything. I do want confidence that I can read my emails quickly and easily, and plaintext makes that promise a lot better than HTML does.
- glhaynes 15y ago
  If the problem is reading speed, most email clients can suppress images unless the user specifically requests them to be shown.
- jarin 15y ago
  That's exactly the reason emails come in two parts (text and HTML). You can tell your client to only show plaintext emails if you're so inclined (just like you can tell Firefox to only use your own personal stylesheet). Personally, I prefer the HTML emails and find them faster to go through. It takes me about 2 seconds to skim a Thinkgeek mailer with product images and see if there's anything interesting, vs. having to actually read the entire email and click a bunch of links. Then there are all the nice graphs and colors in the server monitoring emails I get that let me get a big picture overview of the server farm health at a glance every week. If I see any red or too many spikes, I can decide whether to investigate further or get back to coding. For all the benefits I get from HTML email, I'll risk the small chance that getting an email with Paula's pink hearts theme will seriously fuck up my day.
  - city41 15y ago
    Not all HTML messages include a text section. I just looked at the raw message of 6 HTML emails and only two of them had multipart/alternative sections. But if it could be agreed upon to always send both, I think that would be good. And for sure, you do make some good points on where HTML email can be a good thing. Perhaps I'm being too pessimistic.
    - deadcyclo 15y ago
      That's my beef with them too. I prefer text emails, since I do a lot of my email reading on the CLI. It's true, and annoying, that a fair amount don't include multipart/alternative sections. For me it's not a huge problem as I have plugins that will extract the text from the HTML and present the text only, but it's not exactly a great reader experience. Much much worse, however, are all of the people/companies that include multipart/alternative sections, but do it completely wrong: "This is an HTML-email. Your client lacks HTML support. Please visit [url here] to view this email" or even worse "This is an HTML-email. Your client lacks HTML support. Please upgrade your software". I come across these almost daily, and it bugs the hell out of me. Unless it is something very important (bill, sign-up email, etc.) I simply ignore these emails, and they never get read. (Yes, it really is out of spite. I'll ignore them when reading email in a web client or on my phone later. They simply lost their chance) I don't really like HTML mail, but I can live with it. I see the reason why it exists (great for advertisement). However, if you use HTML email, do include multipart/alternative section for non-HTML clients, and include the same information there, non of this "your client can't handle HTML, you loose crap".

glhaynes 15y ago

I'll come right out and say it: I don't care if emails are 30k a piece instead of 600 bytes. Maybe I'm "part of the problem", but so is 98% of the rest of the users of the internet. I simply don't care because it has essentially zero material effect on me. My phone doesn't even sweat under that load.