4 ms·

> Plaintext alternatives are the solution, but support is spotty. Very few people use plaintext email clients. According to campaign monitor [1] 67% of users a

by mdmglr 4y ago

> Plaintext alternatives are the solution, but support is spotty. Very few people use plaintext email clients. According to campaign monitor [1] 67% of users are using graphical email clients. > Takeaway: Inbox delivery can be fickle, unreliable, or outright impossible. The proposed solution to use `mailto:` is also fickle. Users may not have their email client setup or the right client configured in the browser. Also what about users with multiple email accounts setup on the email client. Those users will need to remember to select the desired from email. [1] https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/most-popular-email-clients/ https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/most-popula...

woodruffw 4y ago
There are probably two sampling errors here: users with accessibility requirements (such as screen readers) might not represented in the survey, and "graphical email clients" run a wide range of functionality (including very, very broken HTML and CSS rendering). Even if 2/3rds of users run a graphical email client, that's still 1 out of every 3 who don't. That's a lot! I agree about `mailto:` and multiple accounts having poor UX, however. It'd be nice if there was some way to specify the "intended" outgoing email identity via `mailto:`, but I don't know if that's possible.
autoexec 4y ago
> According to campaign monitor [1] 67% of users are using graphical email clients. That same site also says: "Create a plain text version of your email."
- mdmglr 4y ago
  Yes in the context of some people don't want html. I would like to know how big that "some people" population is. I suspect it is high in academic/hacker news populations. But from experience most people outside of IT don't know what "plain text" is. I would like to find a source (preferably from one of the big email marketing service providers) that has a detailed breakdown of the clients used.

by mdmglr 4y ago

woodruffw 4y ago

There are probably two sampling errors here: users with accessibility requirements (such as screen readers) might not represented in the survey, and "graphical email clients" run a wide range of functionality (including very, very broken HTML and CSS rendering). Even if 2/3rds of users run a graphical email client, that's still 1 out of every 3 who don't. That's a lot! I agree about `mailto:` and multiple accounts having poor UX, however. It'd be nice if there was some way to specify the "intended" outgoing email identity via `mailto:`, but I don't know if that's possible.

autoexec 4y ago

> According to campaign monitor [1] 67% of users are using graphical email clients. That same site also says: "Create a plain text version of your email."

mdmglr 4y ago
Yes in the context of some people don't want html. I would like to know how big that "some people" population is. I suspect it is high in academic/hacker news populations. But from experience most people outside of IT don't know what "plain text" is. I would like to find a source (preferably from one of the big email marketing service providers) that has a detailed breakdown of the clients used.