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What is the "plain text" email world like right now? We (I) get so much HTML email, massive amounts of top posting, "quote the entire thread", etc. etc., just c

What is the "plain text" email world like right now? We (I) get so much HTML email, massive amounts of top posting, "quote the entire thread", etc. etc., just curious what the plain text email experience is like in this day and age?

thenewwazoo 4y ago
> What is the "plain text" email world like right now? A barren, lonely place filled with frustration and populated with creaky relics such as ourselves, yelling at clouds.
woodruffw 4y ago
It's mostly fine for me. I've given up on fighting against top-posting, but most emails still contain a plain text copy and I've never had anyone complain about me responding in plain text.
iib 4y ago
When I tried to setup mutt for email, I saw some online tutorial advising the `elinks -dump` parameter, from a lynx-like browser. HTML emails were much more readable than in their original form.
thejammahimself 4y ago
A lot of the emails I get that come from discussion mailing lists tend to be in plain text format, and they look fine. Some mailing lists also insist on plain text as I recall. I think gmail sends its emails in both plain text, and HTML so if I get an email in my organisation (which 9 times / 10 will normally be sent from gmail) it'll look fine. The only HTML emails I get tend to be newsletters from places like The Guardian, and I normally have to open them in a browser because they just don't look right looking at them straight from neomutt. I don't know about you but I don't tend to get bothered too much when I get sent a HTML email because neomutt will normally use lynx to format it into plain text that can be read from a terminal. Lynx isn't very good for browsing the web but its better for this sort of purpose. I'd, of course, rather people use plain text more for email because I reckon a lot of the HTML emails I see really don't need to have been written in HTML at all. Although the only issue is that HTML emails generated from software sometimes look horrendous in neomutt which is slightly annoying.
layer8 4y ago
Viewing HTML is not a problem (autoview via w3m or similar), and replying in plain text with the bottom-quoted original message usually isn’t a problem either. I believe there are some markdown-based setups you could use to write HTML messages with mutt, though I never used that. Otherwise the biggest restriction IMO with plain text is if you’d wanted to use inline images.
upofadown 4y ago
Throwing this in my mailcap produces better text from HTML emails than most of the plain text sections included along with HTML emails: text/html; w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html; copiousoutput; w3m does a really great job with the alignment of things like tables. Top posting and the like is not really a text client issue...

thenewwazoo 4y ago

> What is the "plain text" email world like right now? A barren, lonely place filled with frustration and populated with creaky relics such as ourselves, yelling at clouds.

woodruffw 4y ago

It's mostly fine for me. I've given up on fighting against top-posting, but most emails still contain a plain text copy and I've never had anyone complain about me responding in plain text.

iib 4y ago

When I tried to setup mutt for email, I saw some online tutorial advising the `elinks -dump` parameter, from a lynx-like browser. HTML emails were much more readable than in their original form.

thejammahimself 4y ago

A lot of the emails I get that come from discussion mailing lists tend to be in plain text format, and they look fine. Some mailing lists also insist on plain text as I recall. I think gmail sends its emails in both plain text, and HTML so if I get an email in my organisation (which 9 times / 10 will normally be sent from gmail) it'll look fine. The only HTML emails I get tend to be newsletters from places like The Guardian, and I normally have to open them in a browser because they just don't look right looking at them straight from neomutt. I don't know about you but I don't tend to get bothered too much when I get sent a HTML email because neomutt will normally use lynx to format it into plain text that can be read from a terminal. Lynx isn't very good for browsing the web but its better for this sort of purpose. I'd, of course, rather people use plain text more for email because I reckon a lot of the HTML emails I see really don't need to have been written in HTML at all. Although the only issue is that HTML emails generated from software sometimes look horrendous in neomutt which is slightly annoying.

layer8 4y ago

Viewing HTML is not a problem (autoview via w3m or similar), and replying in plain text with the bottom-quoted original message usually isn’t a problem either. I believe there are some markdown-based setups you could use to write HTML messages with mutt, though I never used that. Otherwise the biggest restriction IMO with plain text is if you’d wanted to use inline images.

upofadown 4y ago

Throwing this in my mailcap produces better text from HTML emails than most of the plain text sections included along with HTML emails: text/html; w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html; copiousoutput; w3m does a really great job with the alignment of things like tables. Top posting and the like is not really a text client issue...