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Can I Email?
- sebmellen 5y agoI would pay an extra $0.10 per month to any service which offered plaintext only emails... Ah, a man can dream.
- chrismorgan 5y agoIn Fastmail’s webmail: Settings → Preferences → Show advanced preferences → Reading → View HTML, select Always display messages in plain text. Settings → Preferences → Show advanced preferences → Compose & Reply → Compose format, select Plain text, plus untick When replying, use the same format as the original message. I don’t think this is such a rare feature, though it’s generally not made obvious at least.
- l0b0 5y agoThat's about three levels deeper than most users are comfortable navigating, and as such only a negligible fraction of users will ever see this setting, understand what it does, and change it. Too bad every enterprise solution defaults to HTML anyway.
- chrismorgan 5y agoI wrote out the full path to it, but Preferences is the default page in Settings, and Reading and Compose & Reply are just sections inside it. So it’s actually more like “go to Settings, click Show advanced preferences at the bottom of the page, and search for ‘plain’”. And yeah, it is an advanced preference, whether you’d prefer otherwise or not.
- TheSmiddy 5y agoOnly a negligible fraction of users care about this feature and it only needs to be toggled once so it's clearly in the right place.
- sidpatil 5y agoMost users probably don't care about HTML versus plaintext emails. The ones that do care would be the ones willing to pay $0.10 extra per month to enforce plaintext receipt, or willing to dig through a few levels of configuration to enable plaintext receipt.
- loh 5y agoTricepMail has granular/heritable switching between plain text or HTML, with or without images. For example, if you have a mailbox set to plain text but receive an email that you would like to render as HTML, it's just one click away for either the entire thread or just that message.
- sebmellen 5y agoSorry, I suppose I wasn’t very clear. I do this through Posteo and Tutanota already (though perhaps you could sell me on Fastmail with your insider knowledge ;). What I mean is I wish companies would send their transactional emails and newsletters in plaintext. Images and the like could be sent as attachments, as opposed to creepy weblinks that track your opens and IP and everything. I would pay each company $0.10 if they offered me the option of receiving all their emails in plaintext like this.
- oblio 5y agoThey'd probably make less money if you paid them, that's the problem. And you'd also need to be able to somehow force them to <<only>> monetize you through direct payment, because what most companies do is, take your money <<and>> also sell your data, on top of that.
- pembrook 5y agoIf you hang out on HN a lot, I can see how you might think “most companies” are selling your data. But this is hilariously false. Nowhere near “most” companies are selling your data. In fact, an overwhelmingly vast majority of all businesses don’t sell your data. This is true inside Silicon Valley and even more true outside of the Valley. Even in Silicon Valley, most companies understand that selling products and services to customers is more profitable than trashing a customer relationship by selling a customer’s personal info to third parties.
- nerdponx 5y agoThey don't sell it. But they entrust a lot of it to disreputable 3rd parties, who exist to track me all over the internet and then try to show me ads.
- OJFord 5y agoBut possibly only because they haven't yet added 'tech' to the hip abbreviation of their industry, and realised that data is valuable, possibly more valuable than whatever their actual business is? I think people use 'selling my data' as an (inaccurate, sure) shorthand for 'collecting so much data about me and I don't really trust them not to sell it at some point'.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- intc 5y agoWe are soon opening https://c1.fi https://c1.fi - Horde webmail (https://wm.c1.fi https://wm.c1.fi) can do this. (Preferences -> Mail -> Composition -> Default method to compose messages: "Plain Text")
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoAs a side note, I'm amazed that it's 2021 and there's no good mainstream email framework. Foundation ain't it, and MJML is a straight up non-option.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hokumguru 5y agoWhat’s wrong with MJML?
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoI don’t want a framework to lie to me about what it is that I’m writing. I’m not interested in learning MJML. I’m interested in learning what subset of HTML and CSS email clients render and rasterize to. That’s it. I’m sick of stupid developers shilling their software product that I’m suppose to build other products with. They do it with these cutesy photoshop/illustrator logos and dribbble crafted color schemes and drop in things like made with love in (city) in their README.mds on GitHub. I want tools, not someone’s amateur marketing campaign.
- cameronh90 5y ago"I’m interested in learning what subset of HTML and CSS email clients render and rasterize to." Doesn't sound like you want a framework. Sounds like you want a book.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoNope, plenty of CSS frameworks out there that don't try and make up their own tags.
- cameronh90 5y agoThe thing about email is that renderers aren't even implementing the same spec. There is no common subset to learn. Every client implements some vague mess of 1997-era HTML/CSS mixed with different random modern features. Any attempt to try to write anything slightly advanced manually will drive you insane. Mail clients will mangle your code in ways you can't imagine. Every client will mangle it slightly differently. Even the same client on different operating systems will behave differently. Tools like MJML take a compiler approach to email. Why waste time trying to figure out how to implement a for loop in machine code and keep it updated every time a new processor comes out when you can just let the compiler do it?
- dsr_ 5y agoCan you not send lorem ipsum as the text/plain part of your MIME message? Please? I suppose "Your mail program is broken and can't read our message. Please go to this URL" is worse, though.
- _jal 5y agoI actually appreciate them. Both are high-quality signals for "this is something I don't care about", so they're great for filters.
- l0b0 5y agoIt's tempting to make shouldiemail.com and just answer "No" for all these features. Seriously though, it must be years between every time I see an HTML email which would not have been improved by being plain text.
- nxpnsv 5y agoHTML e-mail fill an important function. If it's html, it's a promotion and it gets trashed...
- Mandatum 5y agoAnything that's more visual than function, like fashion or trendy design - text is a waste of time. Email serves every type of business, yes more could be just text - but some will never be served by that format.
- swiley 5y agoAnything more visual than function shouldn't be clogging up my inbox.
- SilverRed 5y agoWhat the average HN user and the average user want is worlds apart. The average person likes their emails to be nicely designed like a website with blocks of colour and the site logos. When they see a plain text email from a site they would be more likely to think they are being scammed than to be impressed at its simplicity and ability to display in the terminal. When every website is hacking around broken table layouts to get them to render in outlook (essentially Word), something is wrong and should be fixed.
- badsectoracula 5y agoHow do you know that is what the average person likes or what they think? Are there any studies for these?
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- paxys 5y agoWhat standard/RFC does this site pull from? The list of features a client is expected to support seems to be pretty arbitrary.
- edoceo 5y agoIts arbitrary cause there is no RFC about the ah-hoc choices email client softwares have made over the years that have kinda become de facto "standards"
- Forge36 5y agohttps://github.com/hteumeuleu/caniemail https://github.com/hteumeuleu/caniemail This is specifically focused at HTML specs/features, and a fork of https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse Targeting HTML rendering engines which are email clients. Fortunately (at least for some of the newer features to be included) Links to MDN are available, and caniuse both link to we spec). CSS min for example is working draft. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-4/#math-function https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-4/#math-function With 90% desktop/mobile browser general usage support, 50% email usage support.
- azernik 5y agoAFAIU this is a fork of caniuse.com; the features it tracks are probably a strict subset of those. The feature definitions seem to be maintained manually, at https://github.com/hteumeuleu/caniemail/tree/master/_features; https://github.com/hteumeuleu/caniemail/tree/master/_feature... assuming it follows the caniuse.com community model, information about supported browsers is similarly crowdsourced.
- dang 5y agoOne past thread: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948826 - Sept 2019 (196 comments)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoprevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948826
- tyingq 5y agoI like the AMP for email table: https://www.caniemail.com/features/amp/ https://www.caniemail.com/features/amp/
- PostHeat 5y agoThis seems pretty useful. I'm actually working on a project right now (https://postheat.com https://postheat.com) to automate all the styling and html for devs and I've had to learn most of this the hard way... I think you need some example search b/c I was not sure how to use the tool at first.
- mrwnmonm 5y agoIf that can be applied on a complete html file, it would be great. Take the html, and tell the user which tags will likely cause problems.
- overspeed 5y agoContinuously modifying the URL with the search term wreaks havoc on tab history. Why not wait for the user to finish typing first?
- mvlpn 5y agoI have no clue why something this obvious is not taken care of.
- larsnystrom 5y agoThey should just use history.replaceState() instead of history.pushState().
- josteink 5y agoWeird to see Thunderbird for Mac and Windows perform so differently. Anyone knows what’s up with that? (And what about Linux?)
- zekica 5y agoFrom what I can see, they haven't tested most of the features in Thunderbird for Windows. From my experience, all versions (Windows, macOS, Linux) have the same features.
- ipaddr 5y agoI've been using thunderbird for probably 15 years and have forgotten about html emails. I can imagine they are popular but it is probably the great fishing surface the average user is exposed to.
- azernik 5y agoOh I wish I'd heard of this 2 years ago, would have saved me a lot of trial and error.
- domano 5y agoI find MJML (Mailjet Markup Language) to be a solution for many headaches.
- timvisee 5y agoI love companies that send both HTML and plain text!
- Liskni_si 5y ago…as long as they contain the same content. I've seen e-mails where the HTML content is up to date, and the plain text part contains whatever was being sent a couple years ago, and hasn't been updated since then. Got me quite confused until I figured it out.
- jorangreef 5y agoAnother way of looking at this scoreboard is as an approximate inverse ranking of webmail client security and leak vectors, with Gmail stripping far more dangerous elements than most webmail clients. This is actually a great tool to find vulnerabilities in various webmail clients such as ProtonMail and Hey, just compare the HTML or CSS features they do not yet filter compared to Gmail, then do a search for "[feature] + exploit" to see how a feature could be abused, and then submit a bounty report. For example, there are alot of good reasons that you may not want your webmail rendering SVG images (mXSS, appcache poisoning) or allowing CSS variables or imports. And I'm pretty sure the list supported by Gmail could also be narrowed down further. There are some fantastic bounties lurking in here, just waiting to be discovered.
- felixfbecker 5y agoCurious, what's the risk with SVG, assuming a CSP is used for it that doesn't allow anything (including no scripts)?
- jorangreef 5y agoSVG is a minefield so massive it's hard to give an exhaustive list of everything that could go wrong. Especially when these kinds of assets might be hosted on user content domains and where webmail clients might allow access to the SVG content with inline disposition but outside of an IMG tag (most browsers enable/disable various SVG features such as JS or an app cache manifest according to context). There are also a ton of weird rendering modes that can be triggered for SVG (or MathML) and these can be used to bypass XSS sanitizers by means of mXSS which exploits differences in browser renderings when roundtripping content. And sites with strong CSPs are often especially vulnerable to scriptless attacks, perhaps because they feel more protected. For example, in 2019, there was a bug bounty disclosure to Fastmail about a way to intercept and proxy all email attachment downloads, completely client-side, and yet without involving any JavaScript, simply using HTML5 AppCache. This also affected a whole lot of other providers, but the Fastmail team patched this within 24 hours, a pretty amazing response, and the quickest by far. Here's a fantastic paper from Mario Heiderich (of Cure53) from 2012 on various kinds of scriptless attacks: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.469.7647&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.46...
- traspler 5y ago"Outlook (Windows)" is dead last in the "rankings". That's pretty much the only page on there that matters sadly; Determining which features work on Outlook for Windows and that's the maximum that can go into an HTML EMail. Sure, I'd love to only send txt mails but that sadly does not align with the expectations/desires of the companies I've worked with.
- felixfbecker 5y agoIf Microsoft could just bundle their Edge/Chromium renderer instead of their ancient WordHTML engine, or even the EdgeHTML engine of the previous Edge, they'd do the whole industry a huge favor. It's so frustrating their holding us back. Instead, they allow Google to push technologies like AMP for email for things that could probably be solved with standard HTML.
- mschuster91 5y agoBiggest joke is, they're already having a decent renderer on macOS. You can load plain HTML as a .eml template into it and send it off... but not on Windows, you're stuck with some weird undocumented binary format there.
- traspler 5y agoThe situation is wild. In older Outlook versions they've used IE to render the received mails but used a custom engine when you were writing/editing an email. You could even use Word as an editor so you could generate the HTML using Word as your WYSIWYG IDE. I can understand why that needed some consolidation into one editor and one engine but re-using Word so they wouldn't have to create a new editor wasn't the best decision for the ecosystem. WYSIWYG editors and rendering engines aren't things I know about so I wonder if there have been difficult engineering issues at that time or if they just went at it from a business standpoint of "people see mail like letters so they are documents for which we have word so let's use that". //Edit: Looks like they were mainly interested in providing a great WYSIWYG experience using tools users are already familiar with: https://web.archive.org/web/20110311083708/http:/blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2009/06/24/the-power-of-word-in-outlook.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20110311083708/http:/blogs.offic... great quote: "There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products." - I guess their argument could be that there still is no "HTML standard for email" so they don't have to support anything they don't want to?
- qwertox 5y agoMy first thought was that the higher on the list a client is, the more vulnerable it is. Am I wrong with this assumption?
- lionkor 5y agoI would say that, generally, higher complexity results in more possible attack vectors. Give that assumption, any client high on the list has more attack vectors than ones down the list. I also think, though, that any open source client likely does a good job regardless of feature density, since its likely going to use well vetted code in core components. Saying that, for example, Microsoft's or Apple's code isnt well vetted is unfair, but the amount of eyes that have seen the Microsoft html renderer vs the, say, WebKit one, is likely smaller and less diverse.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoYes.
- danellis 5y agoThis is going to be really useful to me as someone who doesn't really do this kind of thing. Very timely. But don't put every keypress from my searches into my browser history.
- lionkor 5y agoGet KMail on the list!
- stjohnswarts 5y agonot enough users.
- lionkor 5y agowell yeah, without builtin telemetry and government-grade spying, you can't tell how many users it has, fair Edit: i realize this comes off as snarky, sorry. It's meant as a joke. It's reasonable to say that its likely not popular enough.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoApologies, just someone who recently had a customer try to convince me I should rewrite my FPGA code to handle his one or two off product (but very expensive) product for free :) so I understand why developers can't target every user haha.
- shoto_io 5y agoNeat site! We use MJML to ensure compatibility in all mail clients, which works fine. Although MJML is much less flexible than pure HTML.
- kuon 5y agoI really don't like HTML emails as they very often break with my dark theme. Especially those in Outlook, dark blue on dark gray is not very visible. I'd like to have only plain text emails, but some website do not put text version of their mails (notifications...).
- Grustaf 5y agoI wish people didn’t use html at all for emails…
- jeroenhd 5y agoI'm fine with HTML myself, actually; it's stuff like CSS that I'm more worried about. There are plenty of use cases for <li>/<h1>/<em> in emails, and with some nice default user styles they can give everyone a pleasant experience. Sadly, CSS is often applied and the HTML people write is often broken.
- Grustaf 5y agoYou say that, but then a couple of times a month i get emails from a certain cultural society that for some reason always come out with the main text in one giant, one letter wide column… Both on the phone and outlook webmail!
- sleavey 5y agoFirst thing I do when I install Thunderbird on a new computer: disable HTML, enable monospace font.
- wiz21c 5y agoYeah, receiving email in html format is painful. With text, I can look at them the way I want.
- simias 5y agoI still only send plaintext myself, but clearly that ship has sailed. Many mailers don't even bother adding a proper text/plain alternative anymore. I caved in and replaced mutt with Thunderbird personally. Not only for properly displaying HTML, but it was a big reason. Thunderbird sucks massively for composing plain text emails though, and no simple way to integrate an external editor...
- rauhl 5y ago> I caved in and replaced mutt with Thunderbird personally. Not only for properly displaying HTML, but it was a big reason. Thunderbird sucks massively for composing plain text emails though, and no simple way to integrate an external editor... Have you considered emacs with notmuch and the Gnus renderer? It displays most HTML emails well, and when it doesn’t then a browser is just a quick ‘. b’ away. And of course there’s no need to integrate an external editor, because it’s integrated within the editor! As a plus, it is simply amazing how quickly one can search local email.
- dandare 5y agoHi
- nimbius 5y ago>This page ranks email clients based on their support among the 182 HTML and CSS features No thanks. I still recoil at the sight of a read-receipt and the only reason most companies include any of this dreck in an email in 2021 is to either track me or market to me. make email text again.
- breakfastduck 5y agoYou can track people through CSS?
- hanche 5y agoSpecify a background image?
- breakfastduck 5y agoWas a genuine question
- hanche 5y agoI intended it as a genuine answer. Sorry if it appeared a bit snarky. To expand a bit: With css, you can specify a background image to any document element. Something like this, where the url serves to identify you: div.foo { background-image: url('https://example.com/bar.png?t=deadbeef') } But as zeroimpl says in a cousin post, you can do it directly with an image tag, no css needed.
- FranchuFranchu 5y agoLoad a background image and store the IPs that asked for it.
- zeroimpl 5y agoYou could also do that even better with plain <img> tags, so that's not really a special attack vector.
- paultopia 5y ago"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."
- st_goliath 5y agoOn a very similar discussion (e-mail feature bloat; particularly HTML mail) I once heard somebody describe the software developers involved to have suffered from "Beach Boy Syndrome" (wouldn't it be nice if...)
- unlimit 5y agoI could not even understand what the site did. :-(
- greyhair 5y agoThere is nothing I hate more than rich content email. Send me plain text email. Add attachments that I can scan for issues before I open them. If you send me links, I will be very wary of visiting them outside a sandboxed tab. I will not 'click through' from the email client.
- kleer001 5y ago> If you send me links, I will be very wary of visiting them outside a sandboxed tab. I got a link to re-up a certain type of account from my bank. It was very odd, I was quite confused.
- Breza 5y agoI like to use wheregoes.com to probe links. I'm surprised at how many redirects some of them have. I get that an ad link might go through an ad channel, but clicking one non-spam link from a reputable company can plant cookies from a whole bunch of websites.
- sh1mmer 5y agoIt would be great if the JSON data could be easily plugged into a linter so you could quickly validate if you are likely to have issues on a given client or not.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fxleach 5y agoAt first glance I have no idea what this website does. At second glance I still don't.
- FranchuFranchu 5y agoIt checks whether an email client supports and HTML or CSS feature for rendering.
- emaillio 5y agogreat tool for emailgeeks!
- strenholme 5y agoI made the mistake of giving too many companies my email address when those stupid black-the-page popups come up asking for my email. I am in the process of unsubscribing from every one of those emails; there is usually a small “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of them, and they are usually pretty good about honoring unsubscription requests. These days, I disable Javascript on any site which has the audacity to put a popup in the middle of the page as I am reading it. Any site with is not readable without Javascript is one I leave and don’t go back to. The kinds of sleazy outfits which do not honor unsubscribes are the kinds of places email providers are really good about black listing.
- mnx 5y agoOnly 50% support for <marquee>? Where is this world going.
- dethos 5y agoI still prefer text-only emails. I block as much external content as possible and usually those marketing and elaborate designs are all broken. It is very rare that I allow exceptions. That being said, I can see the usefulness of this tool for developers, I just wish people would rely more on plain text.
- kilodeca 5y agohttps://useplaintext.email/ https://useplaintext.email/
- neop1x 5y agoEmail is not a webpage. Keep your web skills for the web, please.
- magwa101 5y agoGad, I am so all over this. In email you have an expectation that it is stored on the server, and it always is, unless you explicitly delete it. Messaging? The expectations are all over the place. Particularly bad is SMS.
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