15 ms·

Use plain-text email

225 points by lproven 4y ago

burnte 4y ago
No, it's 2022.
gerikson 4y ago
Previous discussion (341 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513987
russfink 4y ago
There is no rationale given as to “why plaintext.” HTML can be much more expressive in a shorter amount of authoring time.
- remram 4y ago
  There is, it's further down the page: https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext
  - vel0city 4y ago
    > Rich text isn't that great, anyway proceeds to write a nearly 3,000 word document with rich formatting an inline images...
    - ddevault 4y ago
      Little known fact: a website and an email are different things.
      - vel0city 4y ago
        What difference does that make? Their arguments are similar in both cases. HTML and embedded media increase security risks and can lower accessibility. Rich text isn't that great anyways, nobody needs it. Just use periods instead of bullet points. Why would anyone want to make different headings or make some text bold? Completely superfluous. Plain text should be all you need, in every medium. Why should you bother using markup on a webpage? How do those reasons never apply to sending an email?
- eatonphil 4y ago
  Sure there is: https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext. (I don't agree with it, but it's there.)
sbuk 4y ago
- sbuk 4y ago
  I don’t see the need to write why I’m saying no. There are over 1000 words in an article that says nothing. This is someone that is pissed off because they basically want to use email like it was 1979.
  - joemi 4y ago
    I don't necessarily agree with the article (and I don't see it ever being possible to get the world to move back to plaintext email), but the article isn't saying nothing. There are legitimate reasons to want plaintext email. I wouldn't dismiss it in the way you've done. We (HN community) can and should have better discussions than this.
mycoborea 4y ago
I do wish more email clients could render markdown from a plaintext message (written with markdown syntax, of course).
- JonathanBuchh 4y ago
  I've been using MailMate[1] on MacOS, but I don't know any other email clients that render Markdown. [1]: https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/
  - Mailtemi 4y ago
    My email app _Mailtemi_ actually does HTML -> Markdown. Still curious, is it worth going this direction? I'm using Markdown for email preview, local search, etc. In the future I think about experimenting with voice mail. Something like "Read all important emails", which will skip all marketing, updates, or forums. Also I have an experimental feature email to be viewed always in Markdown.
  - DavideNL 4y ago
    Thanks for the tip, looks great i will definitely give it a try. For €62, i wonder how often a new version arrives / i'll have to buy/upgrade again...
- lproven 4y ago
  Mozilla Thunderbird does that, with the older, pre-Markdown, internet-standard version. Which also works in Facebook Messenger and in WhatsApp, which very few people seem to know.
  - gglitch 4y ago
    I'm sorry, but searching the documentation (and the internet) is failing me - would you please provide an example or link? Thank you.
    - lproven 4y ago
boffinism 4y ago
"[Plain-text email] is strongly preferred" I think it's significant that this is written in the passive voice. Because written this way it has the semblance of officialness, of generalness. Whereas writing it in the active voice would reveal that the people doing the preferring are just the people who made this website, and this preference is just that: a preference. I love HTML emails, because I use italics basically all the time in my writing, and underscores _just don't offer the same experience_.
- soheil 4y ago
  This. It's interesting that there is nothing about the authors mentioned anywhere except: > "Plaintext Certified" graphic by Jens
  - bdn_ 4y ago
    Right above that line, the site notes that the code is available here [1]. It looks like the majority of it was written by Drew DeVault, who runs SourceHut [2], where the code is hosted. [1]: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/useplaintext.email https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/useplaintext.email [2]: https://sourcehut.org https://sourcehut.org
- quasarj 4y ago
  - arkitaip 4y ago
    Italics have been part of literature for hundreds of years, pretty sure you can manage to read an email or two with italics in them.
    - memorable 4y ago
      Or at least read them without the italics.
    - rhplus 4y ago
scblock 4y ago
etchalon 4y ago
HTML in email was a deeply horrible idea with no justification beyond "Well, Microsoft wanted to make some emails prettier…"
acidburnNSA 4y ago
Honestly if the default font for composing and reading was better I'm sure I'd like the look and feel of plaintext much more. Surely it's a setting somewhere, I just haven't gone looking for it.
- zahllos 4y ago
  In thunderbird you can do this quite easily. Edit|Settings|Fonts&Colors|Advanced. You can pick your default fonts for sans, serif etc and decide if plaintext should use a monospaced font or not. I think most mail clients can do this, but thunderbird is what I use. On Windows, preferences may be under Tools instead. No idea on Mac.
cube00 4y ago
Some companies have given up on plain text completely. I'm getting these kind of messages now: We have tried to send you this email as HTML (pictures and words) but it wasn't possible. In order for you to see what we had hoped to show you please click here to view online in your browser: <long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids> Ironically in this case the HTML message they so dearly hoped I'd see is only a notification that there is an update and I should go to the website and login to see what the update is. To top it off, the only picture in the message is the company's logo.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  This is the way. When I got an newsletter email, I quick scan for its blog link immediately and go to read it on website.
- superkuh 4y ago
  The worst part of those is that most of the time the HTML isn't even HTML. It's encoded in some some sort of weird email-html-specific content type. Base64 if you're lucky. Something far more obscure and email-html specific if you not. When that happens I then have to copy the raw encoded "text" into some shady website $email-html-specific-content-type to text converter just to get the html in it's natural character set to manually find and copy the <long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids>.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    Do you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable ? Since its a transfer encoding, the email client needs to decode it before rendering it. Its comparable to HTTP chunking.
    - superkuh 4y ago
      Ah, so not directly HTML's fault. Thanks. It's just the confluence of Quoted-printable transfer encoding and the tendency for HTML emails to embed links split up and in non-href and other tags that end up not getting rendered on my thunderbird fork in text mode which means I have to view source and deal with the Quoted-printable URLs.
0898 4y ago
This is why we stick with ConvertKit. Other email providers make you jump through hoops to send an email newsletter that looks like it came from a person.
mrzool 4y ago
This sounds great until you realize that, in the real world, people want to have some options to format the text they write (italics, bold, hyperlinks and the like), and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  In the real world, people want to have their company logo, nine image links to their social media accounts, and a special font for their signature. Then they top post their entire email to a 257 email chain, so you have to do a kind of inverted scavenger hunt in order to figure out what they're talking about, none of which is improved or aided by the company logo, special font, or image links to nine different social media accounts. And I haven't even gotten to grandma's love of emojis to convey her appreciation of your ribald joke about cookies. Email is a tool, and like all tools, it can be grossly misused and abused.
  - temp_account_32 4y ago
    Yeah but we wouldn't want to cripple it for everyone because there exist some people who abuse it.
  - lbriner 4y ago
    This is a strawman. How does plain text stop people abusing a medium?
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      Their argument is that by not having HTML, people can no longer annoy with their use of HTML. This is a client-side issue, IMO. If someone doesn't like HTML, simply don't enable parsing of it and view the source.
      - jevgeni 4y ago
        People can annoy with plain words just as well.
dtjohnnymonkey 4y ago
I wonder if the point would have hit harder if the website was in plain text?
res0nat0r 4y ago
I'd love to use mutt for my mail email client every day, but it's essentially impossible to use especially for work context without me risking missing important emails or having to spend way too much time fiddling with viewing html emails from other companies / coworkers in a reasonable fashion via the mutt TUI so unfortunately this isn't going to happen for me.
- knowledge-clay 4y ago
  As a compromise, I have a key bound to open a web browser to read any html-only emails. I find it to be the best of both worlds.
funnybookbinder 4y ago
I run into difficulties with text-wrapping in plain-text emails. If there are nested quotations, the wrapping can get jumbled, especially if reading on a small screen like a smartphone. Don't have that issue with html emails. Am I doing something wrong?
- progval 4y ago
  It means the sender did not use format=flowed
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    format=flowed doesn't work on all readers. I have format=flowed turned on and it still doesn't display as properly wrapped on various email readers.
- scblock 4y ago
  No, the specifics of making sure plain text email wraps correctly are just complex enough it might as well be html email. It's 2022, and in this day and age the concept of sticking to 80 columns of plain text is outdated and mostly reactionary.
- petercooper 4y ago
  I was keen to try out 100% pure plain text emails and ran into this problem too. The reading experience on mobile wasn't good, and that's increasingly where people are. Very spartan, minimal HTML resolves all the problems, but then you're back to HTML.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    If all that was used was basic HTML formatting tags, I'd be fine with it. But that's not what it is.
    - petercooper 4y ago
      Sure, but if there were enough motivation and interest from various broader communities (not just in email, but also security, say) maybe a "Gemini" style approach could work. I would be very happy for email to be limited to a Markdown-style subset of HTML.
jaytaylor 4y ago
Years ago I made a Go library called `html2text' just for this: https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text/ https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text/ https://jaytaylor.com/html2text https://jaytaylor.com/html2text It takes HTML as input and generates markdown-esque plaintext, with the main focus being to make the plaintext version easy and pleasant to read for human beings. Then using MIME types*, you transmit both the rich html version alongside the generated text/plain version. This is cool because it makes it easy to respect both rich clients (like Gmail et. al.) as well as command-line or other clients which work better with simple text. Hope this helps folks have the best of both worlds! :) cheers * n.b. To ensure this works properly, be sure to use the right MIME headers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3902455/mail-multipart-alternative-vs-multipart-mixed https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3902455/mail-multipart-a...
- joshmanders 4y ago
  Yep, I do similar with all emails I send, run the html through a `html2text` transformer and attach that as the plaintext variant of the email. Now whatever the receiver decides they want to view they can.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
As someone who invented email DSL in org that did heavy email marketing, yes, please use plain-text, save dev time 500 hours a year. Generated image from html is also doable. When user click image link in email, it goes to that html page.
- mattl 4y ago
  Which developer is being saved 500 hours a year?
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    Anyone that's responsible for implementing email layout from marketing team's mockups. Marketing: lets try this new fancy widget floating on the left and that on the right, make it look good for Outlook v.xxx+ on android urghhh.
jeffrom 4y ago
Fun bit of history: Jamie Zawinski thinks he may have invented html email while at Netscape [0]. [0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/09/html-email-was-that-your-fault/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/09/html-email-was-that-your-fa...
- robin_reala 4y ago
  It might be worth pointing out that JWZ doesn’t like HN and redirects any referrals to an interesting image, in case you were thinking of clicking on that directly instead of copying and pasting.
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    Maybe @dang should just change it so links to jwz.org aren't clickable? It would force us to copy-paste.
    - Cyberdog 4y ago
      Why is it HN's job to fix someone else's breakage of the web's standard behavior?
      - colejohnson66 4y ago
        It's not. But that doesn't mean we can't try to avoid the issue. For example, stores aren't required to use time delay safes (and other robbing counter-measures). After all, robbery is illegal, but they still probably should install them.
        sph 4y ago
        Eh, let people learn about JWZ's distaste for HN and the iconic picture of a hairy testicle in an eggcup. It's childish but harmless fun. The Internet has been sanitised enough already.
teddyh 4y ago
I’ll settle for text/enriched (RFC 1896). It’s the best of both worlds: The safety of plain text, but proportional fonts, flowing paragraphs, and text styling like HTML.
jabroni_salad 4y ago
I'm willing to wiggle a bit here. Stop putting pictures and fixed width tables in your signatures at least...
- mxuribe 4y ago
  > ...Stop putting pictures and fixed width tables in your signatures at least... This is what i think of whenever i change employers, and/or they rebrand and need "everyone to come on and let's all update our email sigs together to support the brand!" ugh!
duxup 4y ago
I love the idea of plain text email. But I don't think it works as well with a huge volume of mail most folks get. As I create emails for customers and such I find some level of html / banner / something even beyond the subject is needed to help folks filter though all their emails. In my experience emails with a company banner and large text indicating the reason for the email "your order has shipped" are spotted quickly by their customers / quickly understood / filtered easier.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Using the subject line to indicate the reason for the email isn't sufficient?
AdamH12113 4y ago
> HTML emails are mainly used for marketing - that is, emails you probably don't want to see in the first place. The few advantages they offer for end-users, such as links, inline images, and bold or italic text, aren't worth the trade-off. Inline images are a huge, huge advantage, especially for internal business communications where an email may be the only real documentation of a problem and its solution. (Or at least the only documentation that can stand on its own -- the alternative is usually a PowerPoint deck with missing information that was only given in a one-time presentation.) Being able to add a graph or a table or a schematic or a photo is important for anyone who works with non-text data. I suspect some programmers may be unaware of how unusual it is to work entirely in text.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  Those things you mentioned are a-ok, but including a photo in the email signature really bugs me. There are times when I want to look for emails with an attachment, but often the company logo in the signature causes false hits.
- djbusby 4y ago
  You can send a plain text with attachments? That's how I used to do it (1996-2022)
  - anamexis 4y ago
    I think the keyword there is "inline."
    - adrian_b 4y ago
      Many e-mail clients display the photos attached to plain text e-mail messages as "inline", you do not need a HTML message for that.
      - solarkraft 4y ago
        So how do I put text between them?
lbriner 4y ago
"HTML emails are mainly used for marketing - that is, emails you probably don't want to see in the first place." Stops reading.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  To be fair, I can't think of the last time a human sent me an HTML email.
  - remram 4y ago
    You mean HTML-only email?
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      No, an email that wasn't text/plain.
      - remram 4y ago
        With multipart, every part has a separate mimetype. Your client will decide which one to show. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Multipart_messages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Multipart_messages Do you mean that there is a part that isn't text/plain ("HTML email") or that there is no part that is text/plain ("HTML-only email")?
        marginalia_nu 4y ago
        I mean there is no HTML part.
itslennysfault 4y ago
> HTML emails are mainly used for marketing Whaaaaat? How about a more honest version... > HTML emails are mainly used BY LITERALLY EVERYONE
- moxieta 4y ago
  That's not a fair interpretation. Most people only want to send text for the most part, but are forced to send HTML via client defaults.
  - itslennysfault 4y ago
    That's entirely false. "most people WANT to send text" .. nah most people literally don't care and are fine with the html default, and occasionally use bold or italics or images, and they would probably complain if they suddenly couldn't.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is the true answer, everyone uses them and that battle has been lost years and years ago. The effort should be fought in adding a newer way of doing HTML email that is better, and finally kill that damn IE 6-based renderer used by Outlook. Curse that thing.
- UberFly 4y ago
  Yes, this. Also, any good email client will strip out the graphics and just give you formatted text anyway. I use Fastmail's web interface and there's a "Load Images" button but I rarely click it. Best of both worlds.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Not true. 90% of the emails I get from real people are plain-text. 100% of the emails I get from businesses are HTML. It makes it quick and easy to sort out a lot of the garbage.
  - itslennysfault 4y ago
    That's weird. I'd say 90% of the emails I get from real people are from gmail which are 100% html. I don't know ANYONE that sends plain text emails tbh.
yonrg 4y ago
I'm a huge proponent of text/plain. There was a long-ish thread on the mutt mailing list recently, which open my narrow mind a bit. Html formatted mails are not a question of personal preference. Exchanging Mails with other people also includes supporting their way of dealing with mails. So since a long time I convert text/html to plain text in order to be able to read that. Since recently, I also send a simple multipart mail with both text/plain and text/html. The conversion script it a simple 10 lines python markdown script. All done and all happy. In particular, it makes my mail more readable on any kind of display; e.g. narrow phone or wide monitor. I'm still happy to converse only via text/plain, like here.
UI_at_80x24 4y ago
Know your audience. I default to plain-text 99% of the time. In my corporate world I am FORCED to embed excel tables, colour-coded replies (Bob's replies are in RED, Alice's replies are in GREEN) [fuck the colour blind]. And I hate it. So it's only those emails that get it. I have been forced to conform. Outlook is still configured for plain-text email, and bitches about it whenever possible. Everywhere else, plain-text only. Resistance is futile.
yyyk 4y ago
Plain text is plainly unusable for a significant amount of people. Mobile? Have fun with a small font size to accommodate 80 chars. Ultra-wide? Same flowing problems. Right to Left language? Learn to 'work' with zero-width characters or you're SOL. Want to give more data to screen readers (sometimes the table is actually a table)? Hah. Some people need to understand there are more use cases to email than mailing lists and that the 90s aren't coming back.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
  > Mobile? Have fun with a small font size to accommodate 80 chars. Whoever said the column width has to be 80 chars everywhere?
  - yyyk 4y ago
    Not uncommonly, the provider/program through which the email was sent.
    - couchand 4y ago
      It's really amusing how people addicted to rich text assume plain text suffers the same limitations.
    - ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
      Then it will just contain extra line breaks, but the mobile MUA reading it will reflow it just fine.
- discreditable 4y ago
  80 char wrapping is solved by format=flowed. However none of the popular providers seem to implement it.
  - adolph 4y ago
    Yes, a lot of the “problems” of plain text boil down to poor authoring/rendering tools. On the other hand, humanity would probably be better served by moving toward semantic representation instead of fiddling in the deck over txt vs html.
krossitalk 4y ago
Imagine trying to read that very website as a plain text email. The headers, bolding, and rulers make a huge difference. Plain text email reminds me of the original ethos behind Markdown. "You're already doing it". Except, not everyone has the same rules. We can all read it but there becomes necessary a translation layer.
Bakary 4y ago
HTML is great when you deal with lots of email correspondence at work. The signatures and formatting make it easier to anchor memories and navigate conversations.
- queuebert 4y ago
  Even text email clients can organize messages into threads, which arguably is much clearer than a long HTML email with nested, multi-colored replies.
  - yyyk 4y ago
    Some people actually have a different workflow than old style mailing lists.
_verandaguy 4y ago
There are some valid reasons to avoid using HTML email (some of which are even listed on this page -- like avoiding link obfuscation), but my god does this page come off as condescending, right from the opening line ("Plain-text email is strongly preferred"). The reality is that HTML email's too convenient to go away at this point. It fills enough niches both in people's corporate and personal lives to ever truly be undone, and having so many of the recommended clients being TUI-based (and emacs-based, apparently) shows a particular tone-deafness since TUI mail clients will almost certainly never be widely-adopted ever again, even by people who spend lots of time in a shell. Add on to that, that TUI mail clients will almost invariably render monospace fonts, which aren't great for reading things other than code.
- vel0city 4y ago
  Its also incredibly condescending having them tell me I shouldn't format my message as HTML when the message they're using to tell me that is an HTML formatted message. If plain text was more than acceptable to get the point across, this page wouldn't use HTML. Instead, they have an inline image, they have multiple font weights, anchor tags, inline styles, chosen fonts, changes in colors, hyperlinks, bulleted lists, etc.
  - themadturk 4y ago
    But they're two different media. It's like they're saying "writing in longhand is best" but you're complaining because they're using mass print media to spread the word. Or complaining because a book or movie is advertised on TV or in a newspaper.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      Nearly all their arguments as to why prefer plaintext versus HTML apply for this media as well. Having this page as an HTML document instead of plain text increases security risks and can reduce accessibility. They argue you do not need HTML formatting to get a point across, but then rely on HTML formatting to get their point across. Why did they bother using bulleted lists? Why did they use links and anchor tags instead of just having the URL written out in plain text? Why would they bother embedding an image into their page instead of just giving us the URL and letting us choose to fetch it if we wanted to after reading the message? Maybe because its better to look at and read using HTML formatting instead of just plain text. Maybe I want a bulleted list in an email. Maybe I would like to have a link instead of just having a giant URL as plain text in my email. Maybe I'd like to have the image I'm talking about in my email in the email instead of being some other resource for the person to fetch. Its condescending for them to say "You should never use bulleted lists, here's a bulleted list of reasons why you shouldn't use bulleted lists!" Its condescending for them to say don't use links when they use loads of links. If its better to just put the full URL out there plainly, then they should have done it. They didn't because its not better, its nice using links. If the alternative is perfectly acceptable, why didn't they just use the alternative? They didn't, because the alternative isn't perfectly acceptable all the time. There's a good reason to mark up your writing. Its condescending for them to say: > Rich text isn't that great, anyway in a rich-text document. If rich text isn't that great, why are they using it? Because the alternative isn't that great!
jacobsenscott 4y ago
Don't. Your plain text email is going to render like shit in any modern mail client, and you are going to look like fool who can't write an email. You should actually try this if you use plain text email - email yourself and try and read it in a normal mail client (gmail, outlook, etc) on a phone. You'll need to scroll horizontally to read the message. Now read it on a normal desktop email client. You'll see a skinny tall column of text in a tiny font. Now reply to a normal html email thread and view it in a normal mail client. Congrats - you've just broken the formatting for everyone* on the thread. Nobody wants you see those >> things all over the place. I don't know why this idea persists. Nobody wants to read a book in a fixed width font, nobody wants to read a web page in a fixed width font that doesn't adapt to your viewport size, etc. Hell, programmers even want colors and fancy formatting in their source code. Plain text email is the ham radio of the internet. If you are an email hobbiest and you enjoy sending and receiving plain text emails to other hobbiests more power to you. But don't try and setup a meeting at work over your ham radio. You'll just look dumb.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > You should actually try this if you use plain text email - email yourself and try and read it in a normal mail client (gmail, outlook, etc) on a phone. You'll need to scroll horizontally to read the message. OK, I just did. I didn't have any of those issues at all. Perhaps it depends on the exact mail client you use?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
naet 4y ago
The real problem with HTML emails is inconsistent rendering by different email clients. I had to make some HTML email templates for a marketing campaign, thought it would be easy seeing as I make HTML website template all day.... ended up spending hours debugging random Microsoft Outlook rendering inconsistencies and other client issues. Some clients don't support anything but inline styles, others support style tags. Some support media queries, some don't. Some support custom fonts / web fonts, some don't. Gmail in browser behaves differently from Gmail android client behaves differently from Gmail iOS client, etc. There's an absolutely infuriating dark mode on Outlook that randomly swaps certain color hues and as far as I can tell there's no way to detect or show different styles for it, you just have to make your design stand up to certain colors being swapped (don't use any logo or other image that can't stand clearly against both black and white backgrounds). I learned a lot about a bunch of extremely legacy HTML and CSS rules that would never be used in a modern website but were basically required for a semi-responsive email. I won't ever do it again- if I need a custom styled email, I'll use someone else's template or email template builder service.
- cygned 4y ago
  Try MJML, works wonders
- mxuribe 4y ago
  Thanksfully, you are not alone, and lots of these cuts have been codified into best practices...and published as guides by the big players in the email marketing world (e.g. mailchimp, campaign monitor, etc.). If/Whenever you need to work in this area, just look up one of those guides from those established players and follow their lead...better yet, grab one of their templates when they offer them. In addition, as @cygned has noted, there are even some "meta languages" (like MJML and many others) created by these same big email providers that serve to do away with some of the more annoying parts of crafting email templates. Of course, i hope to never have to spend too muich time in creating templates for email....just too many nightmares from so many yearsplaying in this space! ;-)
etchalon 4y ago
The primary argument I'm seeing against Plain Text Email is "But I like formatting!" OK. But there were probably better ways to achieve lightweight formatting options that didn't include "Let's embed a full web browser in our email client."
steviedotboston 4y ago
This ship sailed a very long time ago.
upofadown 4y ago
In the middle of an entirely different discussion[1] it more or less fell out that the problems associated with HTML emails would not be problems if we started treating unsigned/anonymous emails with some reasonable amount of suspicion. Letting any rando on the internet have access to your HTML interpreter doesn't seem reasonable and things are much better if you only allow that access to people you actually know. HTML is not the only problem with email that would be lessened if we could finally get people to start signing their emails and start treating anonymous emails with suspicion... [1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:no_new_ae https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:no_new_ae (See the "A proposed alternative solution to EFAIL" section)
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Can you cite any major security breaches accomplished by HTML in email context? I'm talking HTML and not links. I think links should be banned in email, and you should be forced to copy and paste them to get to wherever you're going, it's too easy to hide the actual link with hypertext.
UncleSlacky 4y ago
On a similar note, the ASCII Ribbon campaign: http://www.asciiribbon.org http://www.asciiribbon.org
segaboy81 4y ago
I had a BSD-geek friend whose area of specialty was in deploying and maintaining mail servers on that platform. He had always been an advocate for plain-text emails. He was also a single guy who had sex with his dog, so he wasn't emailing pictures to his grandma. Personally, I think evolving email into HTML has always been a foregone conclusion regardless of the inconvenience it causes to an extreme minority. Plus, I like the convenience of sending photos to grandma and checking her email is all she has the aptitude for anyway. Long live HTML mail!
- slaymaker1907 4y ago
  I really hope you meant "sex like a dog" or something with that anecdote.
encryptluks2 4y ago
First and foremost, I believe most of the issues can be addressed using a markup language like Markdown or similar. Accessibility clients can be updated to accommodate such formatting as part of the standard. Second, hard wraps should not be mandatory and in fact discouraged. If someone wants 72 columns then there email client should be the one setting that, not the message itself.
jrnichols 4y ago
until you eradicate the likes of Outlook and Gmail from the internet, I think this is pretty much a lost cause.
- lproven 4y ago
  Gmail works in plain text just fine. Bottom-quoting, everything. I have it configured to plain-text by default. If you're going to blame webmail, then blame the crappy broken webmail clients: Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. But not Gmail. Its good plain-text handling is one of the reasons I use it.
  - jrnichols 4y ago
    Nah, I'm going to blame Gmail as well because a ton of problems that I still encounter have to do with what Google/Gmail has done to email as we know it. Nice that you have it set up that way but most people don't, therefore Gmail is still part of the problem. users just accept the defaults and that's part of the problem too. I hate gmail, and always will. I think that google/gmail has caused untold damage to the internet as we know it and I will never use Google products again.
    - lproven 4y ago
      Don't blame the tool for its users' incompetence. Gmail does plain text email just fine, and it's a major feature for me.
thomashabets2 4y ago
Partly the reason I wrote and use this command line client for GMail: https://github.com/ThomasHabets/cmdg https://github.com/ThomasHabets/cmdg
swyx 4y ago
Quincy Larson runs a 4 million subscriber list with plain text email https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/quincy-larson-5-links-worth-your-time-email-full-list/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/quincy-larson-5-links-wort...
dimensionc132 4y ago
Plain text is preferred always; no pixel tracking
vanous 4y ago
I will rather use HTML email via standard federated email network and be able to put images inline with text captions describing these images, rather than being text only email purist and then having to bend over to send images with "inlined" text in silo apps like whatsapp, slack, signal or telegram.
bitwize 4y ago
"How about you use an email client from this century." --the IT guy at a place I worked
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lkrubner 4y ago
HTML is what killed email. The younger generation hates email in part because they associate email with spam, and spam email only became a large business because of HTML email. Plain text email could not easily be used for advertising, nor did plain text email support clever, manipulative tricks, like embedding hidden images so as to track people without them being aware of being tracked. Also, HTML email was implemented without enough thought as to the security and privacy problems it allowed, and it took 20 years to lock down HTML email to limit the damage to security and privacy. Plain text email was a great communication technology, and fairly immune to spam. I've often thought we should re-launch plain text email as some new, separate protocol. A wider demographic would be willing to communicate with plain text email, just as a wider demographic is comfortable with text messages on their phones.
- nuancebydefault 4y ago
  Spam heavily uses styling and formatting features of HTML. Similarly, paper advertising uses a lot of color and glossy paper. Saying that HTML killed email is like saying glossy and colorful print killed books.
  - JJMcJ 4y ago
    A fancy ad in a magazine (not a book, of course) won't send you 2,000 pieces of advertising mail if you look at. An ad in a magazine won't empty your checking account if you write your phone number in another ad on the page. Unlike email.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    Tracking bugs in images is what killed HTML in email. For my security and privacy I have to block all external content by default. This means I get a ton of marketing emails that are either blank or missing the important bits unless I choose to load the external content. The end result is that they almost always get trashed unread. I might actually be missing out on a useful new product or a great deal but I'm not going to bother with the extra clicks and unknown risks because marketing wanted to make it pretty over making it accessible.
jwithington 4y ago
If I’m not phishing or tracking anyone as the sender, those points aren’t applicable. If I am, I’m going to use HTML anyway. if you are using an email client that only supports plain-text, we’re probably already in some Matrix.org chatroom together or following each other on Mastodon and I’ll just hit you up there.
Eric_WVGG 4y ago
I love fangless manifestos like this, because they're usually right, and there's nothing better than a quixotic crusade. Here's the hill I'll die on: email works best when it's like a long-form SMS message. As for the folks who go on about branded marketing emails… gawd, it's like hearing someone say "actually I wish I got more, better junk mail" It's a pity that something like Markdown didn't exist back in the nineties. If we could just have had some really basic formatting options (bold, italics, and a couple images are not unreasonable requests), the whole scourge of HTML email might have been sidestepped.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Are there any other manifestos that you are particularly fond of? I hear ya on Markdown.
  - Eric_WVGG 4y ago
    https://realnames.online/ https://realnames.online/ any search result for “considered harmful”
cjf101 4y ago
I'm definitely a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to email. Email is about communication and html gives people tools that they mostly use to make communication harder, not easier. For me, I prefer plain text email when I can get it. The main issue for me is that most of the uses of html email I see simply do not increase the utility of the email from the reader's perspective. Large signatures don't communicate anything useful to me that isn't in the email header. The phone number can be nice, but you didn't need html for that. Your brand identity that takes up half a page (more since I keep email in a small window to the side of my monitor) does nothing other than obscure the content of the email. Trust me, sending me an intensely formatted email with lots of pictures does not increase the likelihood of me doing business with you. 99% of email I receive contains < 1 paragraph of useful information. I would prefer if people just sent that. Then I can read it quickly (since it uses the same font as everything else, not that faux handwriting font you found somewhere and thought looked great) and respond quickly and helpfully, which I hope was the purpose you sent the email in the first place. There's probably a 1% where a nicely formatted document with graphs and images and headers are helpful. But you can just attach a document to the email if you're going to put that kind of effort it.
JohnFen 4y ago
I never allow HTML to render in my emails, for security purposes. I've found it to be rather helpful in determining which emails to delete immediately. If it's HTML, it's probably commercial in nature, and if I can't easily read the contents in the HTML source, then it's certainly an email that isn't worth reading at all. That said, email in general would be greatly improved if it were strictly plain-text.
nailer 4y ago
Plain text email with hard line wrapping looks awful on most devices except terminals.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
Discussion from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513987
i_like_apis 4y ago
No? The imperative tone doesn’t sway me. There are few and poor reasons to “strongly prefer” plaintext. It’s just an aesthetic and personality choice. Which almost no one does.
cryptonector 4y ago
TIL about aerc. For me it's most important feature relative to mutt is having an async IMAP client! I will be trying it!
atoav 4y ago
My tip for thunderbird users is to just use both. Hold Shift while clicking buttons like "Reply", "New Mail", "Forward" etc to change from plaintext into html (or vice versa, depending on your default).
bearmode 4y ago
No. Email clients should all just be forced to render modern HTML properly, so we can do away with all the terrible un-responsive emails.
gullevek 4y ago
The plain text email train has left and will never return. Everywhere it is HTML only. People expect that. Paste a Spreadsheet part from Excel, highlight something, bold something, inline images, etc. Quoting on top ... all bad things happen in mail first.
thomasedwards 4y ago
I‘ve had problems with plain text emails being treated as spam, but send the same content as HTML and it’s allowed through. I’d send more plain text emails, but it would cause more problems.
u801e 4y ago
The phrase "supports bottom posting" isn't the best way to describe formatting replies. Good netiquette typically involves deleting quoted text you're not directly addressing in your reply and type your responses inline. That is: > Quoted point 1 Response 1 > Quoted point 2 Response 2 and so on. Just quoting the entire original message and posting your reply at the bottom is as bad, if not worse, than just top posting.

225 points by lproven 4y ago

No, it's 2022.

Previous discussion (341 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513987

russfink 4y ago

There is no rationale given as to “why plaintext.” HTML can be much more expressive in a shorter amount of authoring time.

remram 4y ago
There is, it's further down the page: https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext
- vel0city 4y ago
  > Rich text isn't that great, anyway proceeds to write a nearly 3,000 word document with rich formatting an inline images...
  - ddevault 4y ago
    Little known fact: a website and an email are different things.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      What difference does that make? Their arguments are similar in both cases. HTML and embedded media increase security risks and can lower accessibility. Rich text isn't that great anyways, nobody needs it. Just use periods instead of bullet points. Why would anyone want to make different headings or make some text bold? Completely superfluous. Plain text should be all you need, in every medium. Why should you bother using markup on a webpage? How do those reasons never apply to sending an email?
eatonphil 4y ago
Sure there is: https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext. (I don't agree with it, but it's there.)

sbuk 4y ago

sbuk 4y ago
I don’t see the need to write why I’m saying no. There are over 1000 words in an article that says nothing. This is someone that is pissed off because they basically want to use email like it was 1979.
- joemi 4y ago
  I don't necessarily agree with the article (and I don't see it ever being possible to get the world to move back to plaintext email), but the article isn't saying nothing. There are legitimate reasons to want plaintext email. I wouldn't dismiss it in the way you've done. We (HN community) can and should have better discussions than this.

mycoborea 4y ago

I do wish more email clients could render markdown from a plaintext message (written with markdown syntax, of course).

JonathanBuchh 4y ago
I've been using MailMate[1] on MacOS, but I don't know any other email clients that render Markdown. [1]: https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/
- Mailtemi 4y ago
  My email app _Mailtemi_ actually does HTML -> Markdown. Still curious, is it worth going this direction? I'm using Markdown for email preview, local search, etc. In the future I think about experimenting with voice mail. Something like "Read all important emails", which will skip all marketing, updates, or forums. Also I have an experimental feature email to be viewed always in Markdown.
- DavideNL 4y ago
  Thanks for the tip, looks great i will definitely give it a try. For €62, i wonder how often a new version arrives / i'll have to buy/upgrade again...
lproven 4y ago
Mozilla Thunderbird does that, with the older, pre-Markdown, internet-standard version. Which also works in Facebook Messenger and in WhatsApp, which very few people seem to know.
- gglitch 4y ago
  I'm sorry, but searching the documentation (and the internet) is failing me - would you please provide an example or link? Thank you.
  - lproven 4y ago

boffinism 4y ago

"[Plain-text email] is strongly preferred" I think it's significant that this is written in the passive voice. Because written this way it has the semblance of officialness, of generalness. Whereas writing it in the active voice would reveal that the people doing the preferring are just the people who made this website, and this preference is just that: a preference. I love HTML emails, because I use italics basically all the time in my writing, and underscores _just don't offer the same experience_.

soheil 4y ago
This. It's interesting that there is nothing about the authors mentioned anywhere except: > "Plaintext Certified" graphic by Jens
- bdn_ 4y ago
  Right above that line, the site notes that the code is available here [1]. It looks like the majority of it was written by Drew DeVault, who runs SourceHut [2], where the code is hosted. [1]: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/useplaintext.email https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/useplaintext.email [2]: https://sourcehut.org https://sourcehut.org
quasarj 4y ago
- arkitaip 4y ago
  Italics have been part of literature for hundreds of years, pretty sure you can manage to read an email or two with italics in them.
  - memorable 4y ago
    Or at least read them without the italics.
  - rhplus 4y ago

scblock 4y ago

etchalon 4y ago

HTML in email was a deeply horrible idea with no justification beyond "Well, Microsoft wanted to make some emails prettier…"

acidburnNSA 4y ago

Honestly if the default font for composing and reading was better I'm sure I'd like the look and feel of plaintext much more. Surely it's a setting somewhere, I just haven't gone looking for it.

zahllos 4y ago
In thunderbird you can do this quite easily. Edit|Settings|Fonts&Colors|Advanced. You can pick your default fonts for sans, serif etc and decide if plaintext should use a monospaced font or not. I think most mail clients can do this, but thunderbird is what I use. On Windows, preferences may be under Tools instead. No idea on Mac.

cube00 4y ago

Some companies have given up on plain text completely. I'm getting these kind of messages now: We have tried to send you this email as HTML (pictures and words) but it wasn't possible. In order for you to see what we had hoped to show you please click here to view online in your browser: <long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids> Ironically in this case the HTML message they so dearly hoped I'd see is only a notification that there is an update and I should go to the website and login to see what the update is. To top it off, the only picture in the message is the company's logo.

Existenceblinks 4y ago
This is the way. When I got an newsletter email, I quick scan for its blog link immediately and go to read it on website.
superkuh 4y ago
The worst part of those is that most of the time the HTML isn't even HTML. It's encoded in some some sort of weird email-html-specific content type. Base64 if you're lucky. Something far more obscure and email-html specific if you not. When that happens I then have to copy the raw encoded "text" into some shady website $email-html-specific-content-type to text converter just to get the html in it's natural character set to manually find and copy the <long-url-with-lots-of-tracking-guids>.
- blueflow 4y ago
  Do you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable ? Since its a transfer encoding, the email client needs to decode it before rendering it. Its comparable to HTTP chunking.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    Ah, so not directly HTML's fault. Thanks. It's just the confluence of Quoted-printable transfer encoding and the tendency for HTML emails to embed links split up and in non-href and other tags that end up not getting rendered on my thunderbird fork in text mode which means I have to view source and deal with the Quoted-printable URLs.

0898 4y ago

This is why we stick with ConvertKit. Other email providers make you jump through hoops to send an email newsletter that looks like it came from a person.

mrzool 4y ago

This sounds great until you realize that, in the real world, people want to have some options to format the text they write (italics, bold, hyperlinks and the like), and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

deltarholamda 4y ago
In the real world, people want to have their company logo, nine image links to their social media accounts, and a special font for their signature. Then they top post their entire email to a 257 email chain, so you have to do a kind of inverted scavenger hunt in order to figure out what they're talking about, none of which is improved or aided by the company logo, special font, or image links to nine different social media accounts. And I haven't even gotten to grandma's love of emojis to convey her appreciation of your ribald joke about cookies. Email is a tool, and like all tools, it can be grossly misused and abused.
- temp_account_32 4y ago
  Yeah but we wouldn't want to cripple it for everyone because there exist some people who abuse it.
- lbriner 4y ago
  This is a strawman. How does plain text stop people abusing a medium?
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Their argument is that by not having HTML, people can no longer annoy with their use of HTML. This is a client-side issue, IMO. If someone doesn't like HTML, simply don't enable parsing of it and view the source.
    - jevgeni 4y ago
      People can annoy with plain words just as well.

dtjohnnymonkey 4y ago

I wonder if the point would have hit harder if the website was in plain text?

res0nat0r 4y ago

I'd love to use mutt for my mail email client every day, but it's essentially impossible to use especially for work context without me risking missing important emails or having to spend way too much time fiddling with viewing html emails from other companies / coworkers in a reasonable fashion via the mutt TUI so unfortunately this isn't going to happen for me.

knowledge-clay 4y ago
As a compromise, I have a key bound to open a web browser to read any html-only emails. I find it to be the best of both worlds.

funnybookbinder 4y ago

I run into difficulties with text-wrapping in plain-text emails. If there are nested quotations, the wrapping can get jumbled, especially if reading on a small screen like a smartphone. Don't have that issue with html emails. Am I doing something wrong?

progval 4y ago
It means the sender did not use format=flowed
- BeetleB 4y ago
  format=flowed doesn't work on all readers. I have format=flowed turned on and it still doesn't display as properly wrapped on various email readers.
scblock 4y ago
No, the specifics of making sure plain text email wraps correctly are just complex enough it might as well be html email. It's 2022, and in this day and age the concept of sticking to 80 columns of plain text is outdated and mostly reactionary.
petercooper 4y ago
I was keen to try out 100% pure plain text emails and ran into this problem too. The reading experience on mobile wasn't good, and that's increasingly where people are. Very spartan, minimal HTML resolves all the problems, but then you're back to HTML.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  If all that was used was basic HTML formatting tags, I'd be fine with it. But that's not what it is.
  - petercooper 4y ago
    Sure, but if there were enough motivation and interest from various broader communities (not just in email, but also security, say) maybe a "Gemini" style approach could work. I would be very happy for email to be limited to a Markdown-style subset of HTML.

jaytaylor 4y ago

Years ago I made a Go library called `html2text' just for this: https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text/ https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text/ https://jaytaylor.com/html2text https://jaytaylor.com/html2text It takes HTML as input and generates markdown-esque plaintext, with the main focus being to make the plaintext version easy and pleasant to read for human beings. Then using MIME types*, you transmit both the rich html version alongside the generated text/plain version. This is cool because it makes it easy to respect both rich clients (like Gmail et. al.) as well as command-line or other clients which work better with simple text. Hope this helps folks have the best of both worlds! :) cheers * n.b. To ensure this works properly, be sure to use the right MIME headers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3902455/mail-multipart-alternative-vs-multipart-mixed https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3902455/mail-multipart-a...

joshmanders 4y ago
Yep, I do similar with all emails I send, run the html through a `html2text` transformer and attach that as the plaintext variant of the email. Now whatever the receiver decides they want to view they can.

Existenceblinks 4y ago

As someone who invented email DSL in org that did heavy email marketing, yes, please use plain-text, save dev time 500 hours a year. Generated image from html is also doable. When user click image link in email, it goes to that html page.

mattl 4y ago
Which developer is being saved 500 hours a year?
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  Anyone that's responsible for implementing email layout from marketing team's mockups. Marketing: lets try this new fancy widget floating on the left and that on the right, make it look good for Outlook v.xxx+ on android urghhh.

jeffrom 4y ago

Fun bit of history: Jamie Zawinski thinks he may have invented html email while at Netscape [0]. [0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/09/html-email-was-that-your-fault/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/09/html-email-was-that-your-fa...

robin_reala 4y ago
It might be worth pointing out that JWZ doesn’t like HN and redirects any referrals to an interesting image, in case you were thinking of clicking on that directly instead of copying and pasting.
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  Maybe @dang should just change it so links to jwz.org aren't clickable? It would force us to copy-paste.
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    Why is it HN's job to fix someone else's breakage of the web's standard behavior?
    - colejohnson66 4y ago
      It's not. But that doesn't mean we can't try to avoid the issue. For example, stores aren't required to use time delay safes (and other robbing counter-measures). After all, robbery is illegal, but they still probably should install them.
      - sph 4y ago
        Eh, let people learn about JWZ's distaste for HN and the iconic picture of a hairy testicle in an eggcup. It's childish but harmless fun. The Internet has been sanitised enough already.

teddyh 4y ago

I’ll settle for text/enriched (RFC 1896). It’s the best of both worlds: The safety of plain text, but proportional fonts, flowing paragraphs, and text styling like HTML.

jabroni_salad 4y ago

I'm willing to wiggle a bit here. Stop putting pictures and fixed width tables in your signatures at least...

mxuribe 4y ago
> ...Stop putting pictures and fixed width tables in your signatures at least... This is what i think of whenever i change employers, and/or they rebrand and need "everyone to come on and let's all update our email sigs together to support the brand!" ugh!

duxup 4y ago

I love the idea of plain text email. But I don't think it works as well with a huge volume of mail most folks get. As I create emails for customers and such I find some level of html / banner / something even beyond the subject is needed to help folks filter though all their emails. In my experience emails with a company banner and large text indicating the reason for the email "your order has shipped" are spotted quickly by their customers / quickly understood / filtered easier.

JohnFen 4y ago
Using the subject line to indicate the reason for the email isn't sufficient?

AdamH12113 4y ago

> HTML emails are mainly used for marketing - that is, emails you probably don't want to see in the first place. The few advantages they offer for end-users, such as links, inline images, and bold or italic text, aren't worth the trade-off. Inline images are a huge, huge advantage, especially for internal business communications where an email may be the only real documentation of a problem and its solution. (Or at least the only documentation that can stand on its own -- the alternative is usually a PowerPoint deck with missing information that was only given in a one-time presentation.) Being able to add a graph or a table or a schematic or a photo is important for anyone who works with non-text data. I suspect some programmers may be unaware of how unusual it is to work entirely in text.

BitwiseFool 4y ago
Those things you mentioned are a-ok, but including a photo in the email signature really bugs me. There are times when I want to look for emails with an attachment, but often the company logo in the signature causes false hits.
djbusby 4y ago
You can send a plain text with attachments? That's how I used to do it (1996-2022)
- anamexis 4y ago
  I think the keyword there is "inline."
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    Many e-mail clients display the photos attached to plain text e-mail messages as "inline", you do not need a HTML message for that.
    - solarkraft 4y ago
      So how do I put text between them?

lbriner 4y ago

"HTML emails are mainly used for marketing - that is, emails you probably don't want to see in the first place." Stops reading.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
To be fair, I can't think of the last time a human sent me an HTML email.
- remram 4y ago
  You mean HTML-only email?
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    No, an email that wasn't text/plain.
    - remram 4y ago
      With multipart, every part has a separate mimetype. Your client will decide which one to show. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Multipart_messages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Multipart_messages Do you mean that there is a part that isn't text/plain ("HTML email") or that there is no part that is text/plain ("HTML-only email")?
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        I mean there is no HTML part.

itslennysfault 4y ago

> HTML emails are mainly used for marketing Whaaaaat? How about a more honest version... > HTML emails are mainly used BY LITERALLY EVERYONE

moxieta 4y ago
That's not a fair interpretation. Most people only want to send text for the most part, but are forced to send HTML via client defaults.
- itslennysfault 4y ago
  That's entirely false. "most people WANT to send text" .. nah most people literally don't care and are fine with the html default, and occasionally use bold or italics or images, and they would probably complain if they suddenly couldn't.
bombcar 4y ago
This is the true answer, everyone uses them and that battle has been lost years and years ago. The effort should be fought in adding a newer way of doing HTML email that is better, and finally kill that damn IE 6-based renderer used by Outlook. Curse that thing.
UberFly 4y ago
Yes, this. Also, any good email client will strip out the graphics and just give you formatted text anyway. I use Fastmail's web interface and there's a "Load Images" button but I rarely click it. Best of both worlds.
JohnFen 4y ago
Not true. 90% of the emails I get from real people are plain-text. 100% of the emails I get from businesses are HTML. It makes it quick and easy to sort out a lot of the garbage.
- itslennysfault 4y ago
  That's weird. I'd say 90% of the emails I get from real people are from gmail which are 100% html. I don't know ANYONE that sends plain text emails tbh.

yonrg 4y ago

I'm a huge proponent of text/plain. There was a long-ish thread on the mutt mailing list recently, which open my narrow mind a bit. Html formatted mails are not a question of personal preference. Exchanging Mails with other people also includes supporting their way of dealing with mails. So since a long time I convert text/html to plain text in order to be able to read that. Since recently, I also send a simple multipart mail with both text/plain and text/html. The conversion script it a simple 10 lines python markdown script. All done and all happy. In particular, it makes my mail more readable on any kind of display; e.g. narrow phone or wide monitor. I'm still happy to converse only via text/plain, like here.

UI_at_80x24 4y ago

Know your audience. I default to plain-text 99% of the time. In my corporate world I am FORCED to embed excel tables, colour-coded replies (Bob's replies are in RED, Alice's replies are in GREEN) [fuck the colour blind]. And I hate it. So it's only those emails that get it. I have been forced to conform. Outlook is still configured for plain-text email, and bitches about it whenever possible. Everywhere else, plain-text only. Resistance is futile.

yyyk 4y ago

Plain text is plainly unusable for a significant amount of people. Mobile? Have fun with a small font size to accommodate 80 chars. Ultra-wide? Same flowing problems. Right to Left language? Learn to 'work' with zero-width characters or you're SOL. Want to give more data to screen readers (sometimes the table is actually a table)? Hah. Some people need to understand there are more use cases to email than mailing lists and that the 90s aren't coming back.

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
> Mobile? Have fun with a small font size to accommodate 80 chars. Whoever said the column width has to be 80 chars everywhere?
- yyyk 4y ago
  Not uncommonly, the provider/program through which the email was sent.
  - couchand 4y ago
    It's really amusing how people addicted to rich text assume plain text suffers the same limitations.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
    Then it will just contain extra line breaks, but the mobile MUA reading it will reflow it just fine.
discreditable 4y ago
80 char wrapping is solved by format=flowed. However none of the popular providers seem to implement it.
- adolph 4y ago
  Yes, a lot of the “problems” of plain text boil down to poor authoring/rendering tools. On the other hand, humanity would probably be better served by moving toward semantic representation instead of fiddling in the deck over txt vs html.

krossitalk 4y ago

Imagine trying to read that very website as a plain text email. The headers, bolding, and rulers make a huge difference. Plain text email reminds me of the original ethos behind Markdown. "You're already doing it". Except, not everyone has the same rules. We can all read it but there becomes necessary a translation layer.

Bakary 4y ago

HTML is great when you deal with lots of email correspondence at work. The signatures and formatting make it easier to anchor memories and navigate conversations.

queuebert 4y ago
Even text email clients can organize messages into threads, which arguably is much clearer than a long HTML email with nested, multi-colored replies.
- yyyk 4y ago
  Some people actually have a different workflow than old style mailing lists.

_verandaguy 4y ago

There are some valid reasons to avoid using HTML email (some of which are even listed on this page -- like avoiding link obfuscation), but my god does this page come off as condescending, right from the opening line ("Plain-text email is strongly preferred"). The reality is that HTML email's too convenient to go away at this point. It fills enough niches both in people's corporate and personal lives to ever truly be undone, and having so many of the recommended clients being TUI-based (and emacs-based, apparently) shows a particular tone-deafness since TUI mail clients will almost certainly never be widely-adopted ever again, even by people who spend lots of time in a shell. Add on to that, that TUI mail clients will almost invariably render monospace fonts, which aren't great for reading things other than code.

vel0city 4y ago
Its also incredibly condescending having them tell me I shouldn't format my message as HTML when the message they're using to tell me that is an HTML formatted message. If plain text was more than acceptable to get the point across, this page wouldn't use HTML. Instead, they have an inline image, they have multiple font weights, anchor tags, inline styles, chosen fonts, changes in colors, hyperlinks, bulleted lists, etc.
- themadturk 4y ago
  But they're two different media. It's like they're saying "writing in longhand is best" but you're complaining because they're using mass print media to spread the word. Or complaining because a book or movie is advertised on TV or in a newspaper.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    Nearly all their arguments as to why prefer plaintext versus HTML apply for this media as well. Having this page as an HTML document instead of plain text increases security risks and can reduce accessibility. They argue you do not need HTML formatting to get a point across, but then rely on HTML formatting to get their point across. Why did they bother using bulleted lists? Why did they use links and anchor tags instead of just having the URL written out in plain text? Why would they bother embedding an image into their page instead of just giving us the URL and letting us choose to fetch it if we wanted to after reading the message? Maybe because its better to look at and read using HTML formatting instead of just plain text. Maybe I want a bulleted list in an email. Maybe I would like to have a link instead of just having a giant URL as plain text in my email. Maybe I'd like to have the image I'm talking about in my email in the email instead of being some other resource for the person to fetch. Its condescending for them to say "You should never use bulleted lists, here's a bulleted list of reasons why you shouldn't use bulleted lists!" Its condescending for them to say don't use links when they use loads of links. If its better to just put the full URL out there plainly, then they should have done it. They didn't because its not better, its nice using links. If the alternative is perfectly acceptable, why didn't they just use the alternative? They didn't, because the alternative isn't perfectly acceptable all the time. There's a good reason to mark up your writing. Its condescending for them to say: > Rich text isn't that great, anyway in a rich-text document. If rich text isn't that great, why are they using it? Because the alternative isn't that great!

jacobsenscott 4y ago

Don't. Your plain text email is going to render like shit in any modern mail client, and you are going to look like fool who can't write an email. You should actually try this if you use plain text email - email yourself and try and read it in a normal mail client (gmail, outlook, etc) on a phone. You'll need to scroll horizontally to read the message. Now read it on a normal desktop email client. You'll see a skinny tall column of text in a tiny font. Now reply to a normal html email thread and view it in a normal mail client. Congrats - you've just broken the formatting for everyone* on the thread. Nobody wants you see those >> things all over the place. I don't know why this idea persists. Nobody wants to read a book in a fixed width font, nobody wants to read a web page in a fixed width font that doesn't adapt to your viewport size, etc. Hell, programmers even want colors and fancy formatting in their source code. Plain text email is the ham radio of the internet. If you are an email hobbiest and you enjoy sending and receiving plain text emails to other hobbiests more power to you. But don't try and setup a meeting at work over your ham radio. You'll just look dumb.

JohnFen 4y ago
> You should actually try this if you use plain text email - email yourself and try and read it in a normal mail client (gmail, outlook, etc) on a phone. You'll need to scroll horizontally to read the message. OK, I just did. I didn't have any of those issues at all. Perhaps it depends on the exact mail client you use?

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naet 4y ago

The real problem with HTML emails is inconsistent rendering by different email clients. I had to make some HTML email templates for a marketing campaign, thought it would be easy seeing as I make HTML website template all day.... ended up spending hours debugging random Microsoft Outlook rendering inconsistencies and other client issues. Some clients don't support anything but inline styles, others support style tags. Some support media queries, some don't. Some support custom fonts / web fonts, some don't. Gmail in browser behaves differently from Gmail android client behaves differently from Gmail iOS client, etc. There's an absolutely infuriating dark mode on Outlook that randomly swaps certain color hues and as far as I can tell there's no way to detect or show different styles for it, you just have to make your design stand up to certain colors being swapped (don't use any logo or other image that can't stand clearly against both black and white backgrounds). I learned a lot about a bunch of extremely legacy HTML and CSS rules that would never be used in a modern website but were basically required for a semi-responsive email. I won't ever do it again- if I need a custom styled email, I'll use someone else's template or email template builder service.

cygned 4y ago
Try MJML, works wonders
mxuribe 4y ago
Thanksfully, you are not alone, and lots of these cuts have been codified into best practices...and published as guides by the big players in the email marketing world (e.g. mailchimp, campaign monitor, etc.). If/Whenever you need to work in this area, just look up one of those guides from those established players and follow their lead...better yet, grab one of their templates when they offer them. In addition, as @cygned has noted, there are even some "meta languages" (like MJML and many others) created by these same big email providers that serve to do away with some of the more annoying parts of crafting email templates. Of course, i hope to never have to spend too muich time in creating templates for email....just too many nightmares from so many yearsplaying in this space! ;-)

etchalon 4y ago

The primary argument I'm seeing against Plain Text Email is "But I like formatting!" OK. But there were probably better ways to achieve lightweight formatting options that didn't include "Let's embed a full web browser in our email client."

steviedotboston 4y ago

This ship sailed a very long time ago.

upofadown 4y ago

In the middle of an entirely different discussion[1] it more or less fell out that the problems associated with HTML emails would not be problems if we started treating unsigned/anonymous emails with some reasonable amount of suspicion. Letting any rando on the internet have access to your HTML interpreter doesn't seem reasonable and things are much better if you only allow that access to people you actually know. HTML is not the only problem with email that would be lessened if we could finally get people to start signing their emails and start treating anonymous emails with suspicion... [1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:no_new_ae https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:no_new_ae (See the "A proposed alternative solution to EFAIL" section)

stjohnswarts 4y ago
Can you cite any major security breaches accomplished by HTML in email context? I'm talking HTML and not links. I think links should be banned in email, and you should be forced to copy and paste them to get to wherever you're going, it's too easy to hide the actual link with hypertext.

UncleSlacky 4y ago

On a similar note, the ASCII Ribbon campaign: http://www.asciiribbon.org http://www.asciiribbon.org

segaboy81 4y ago

I had a BSD-geek friend whose area of specialty was in deploying and maintaining mail servers on that platform. He had always been an advocate for plain-text emails. He was also a single guy who had sex with his dog, so he wasn't emailing pictures to his grandma. Personally, I think evolving email into HTML has always been a foregone conclusion regardless of the inconvenience it causes to an extreme minority. Plus, I like the convenience of sending photos to grandma and checking her email is all she has the aptitude for anyway. Long live HTML mail!

slaymaker1907 4y ago
I really hope you meant "sex like a dog" or something with that anecdote.

encryptluks2 4y ago

First and foremost, I believe most of the issues can be addressed using a markup language like Markdown or similar. Accessibility clients can be updated to accommodate such formatting as part of the standard. Second, hard wraps should not be mandatory and in fact discouraged. If someone wants 72 columns then there email client should be the one setting that, not the message itself.

jrnichols 4y ago

until you eradicate the likes of Outlook and Gmail from the internet, I think this is pretty much a lost cause.

lproven 4y ago
Gmail works in plain text just fine. Bottom-quoting, everything. I have it configured to plain-text by default. If you're going to blame webmail, then blame the crappy broken webmail clients: Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. But not Gmail. Its good plain-text handling is one of the reasons I use it.
- jrnichols 4y ago
  Nah, I'm going to blame Gmail as well because a ton of problems that I still encounter have to do with what Google/Gmail has done to email as we know it. Nice that you have it set up that way but most people don't, therefore Gmail is still part of the problem. users just accept the defaults and that's part of the problem too. I hate gmail, and always will. I think that google/gmail has caused untold damage to the internet as we know it and I will never use Google products again.
  - lproven 4y ago
    Don't blame the tool for its users' incompetence. Gmail does plain text email just fine, and it's a major feature for me.

thomashabets2 4y ago

Partly the reason I wrote and use this command line client for GMail: https://github.com/ThomasHabets/cmdg https://github.com/ThomasHabets/cmdg

swyx 4y ago

Quincy Larson runs a 4 million subscriber list with plain text email https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/quincy-larson-5-links-worth-your-time-email-full-list/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/quincy-larson-5-links-wort...

dimensionc132 4y ago

Plain text is preferred always; no pixel tracking

vanous 4y ago

I will rather use HTML email via standard federated email network and be able to put images inline with text captions describing these images, rather than being text only email purist and then having to bend over to send images with "inlined" text in silo apps like whatsapp, slack, signal or telegram.

bitwize 4y ago

"How about you use an email client from this century." --the IT guy at a place I worked

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lkrubner 4y ago

HTML is what killed email. The younger generation hates email in part because they associate email with spam, and spam email only became a large business because of HTML email. Plain text email could not easily be used for advertising, nor did plain text email support clever, manipulative tricks, like embedding hidden images so as to track people without them being aware of being tracked. Also, HTML email was implemented without enough thought as to the security and privacy problems it allowed, and it took 20 years to lock down HTML email to limit the damage to security and privacy. Plain text email was a great communication technology, and fairly immune to spam. I've often thought we should re-launch plain text email as some new, separate protocol. A wider demographic would be willing to communicate with plain text email, just as a wider demographic is comfortable with text messages on their phones.

nuancebydefault 4y ago
Spam heavily uses styling and formatting features of HTML. Similarly, paper advertising uses a lot of color and glossy paper. Saying that HTML killed email is like saying glossy and colorful print killed books.
- JJMcJ 4y ago
  A fancy ad in a magazine (not a book, of course) won't send you 2,000 pieces of advertising mail if you look at. An ad in a magazine won't empty your checking account if you write your phone number in another ad on the page. Unlike email.
- brewdad 4y ago
  Tracking bugs in images is what killed HTML in email. For my security and privacy I have to block all external content by default. This means I get a ton of marketing emails that are either blank or missing the important bits unless I choose to load the external content. The end result is that they almost always get trashed unread. I might actually be missing out on a useful new product or a great deal but I'm not going to bother with the extra clicks and unknown risks because marketing wanted to make it pretty over making it accessible.

jwithington 4y ago

If I’m not phishing or tracking anyone as the sender, those points aren’t applicable. If I am, I’m going to use HTML anyway. if you are using an email client that only supports plain-text, we’re probably already in some Matrix.org chatroom together or following each other on Mastodon and I’ll just hit you up there.

Eric_WVGG 4y ago

I love fangless manifestos like this, because they're usually right, and there's nothing better than a quixotic crusade. Here's the hill I'll die on: email works best when it's like a long-form SMS message. As for the folks who go on about branded marketing emails… gawd, it's like hearing someone say "actually I wish I got more, better junk mail" It's a pity that something like Markdown didn't exist back in the nineties. If we could just have had some really basic formatting options (bold, italics, and a couple images are not unreasonable requests), the whole scourge of HTML email might have been sidestepped.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Are there any other manifestos that you are particularly fond of? I hear ya on Markdown.
- Eric_WVGG 4y ago
  https://realnames.online/ https://realnames.online/ any search result for “considered harmful”

cjf101 4y ago

I'm definitely a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to email. Email is about communication and html gives people tools that they mostly use to make communication harder, not easier. For me, I prefer plain text email when I can get it. The main issue for me is that most of the uses of html email I see simply do not increase the utility of the email from the reader's perspective. Large signatures don't communicate anything useful to me that isn't in the email header. The phone number can be nice, but you didn't need html for that. Your brand identity that takes up half a page (more since I keep email in a small window to the side of my monitor) does nothing other than obscure the content of the email. Trust me, sending me an intensely formatted email with lots of pictures does not increase the likelihood of me doing business with you. 99% of email I receive contains < 1 paragraph of useful information. I would prefer if people just sent that. Then I can read it quickly (since it uses the same font as everything else, not that faux handwriting font you found somewhere and thought looked great) and respond quickly and helpfully, which I hope was the purpose you sent the email in the first place. There's probably a 1% where a nicely formatted document with graphs and images and headers are helpful. But you can just attach a document to the email if you're going to put that kind of effort it.

JohnFen 4y ago

I never allow HTML to render in my emails, for security purposes. I've found it to be rather helpful in determining which emails to delete immediately. If it's HTML, it's probably commercial in nature, and if I can't easily read the contents in the HTML source, then it's certainly an email that isn't worth reading at all. That said, email in general would be greatly improved if it were strictly plain-text.

nailer 4y ago

Plain text email with hard line wrapping looks awful on most devices except terminals.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

Discussion from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20513987

i_like_apis 4y ago

No? The imperative tone doesn’t sway me. There are few and poor reasons to “strongly prefer” plaintext. It’s just an aesthetic and personality choice. Which almost no one does.

cryptonector 4y ago

TIL about aerc. For me it's most important feature relative to mutt is having an async IMAP client! I will be trying it!

atoav 4y ago

My tip for thunderbird users is to just use both. Hold Shift while clicking buttons like "Reply", "New Mail", "Forward" etc to change from plaintext into html (or vice versa, depending on your default).

bearmode 4y ago

No. Email clients should all just be forced to render modern HTML properly, so we can do away with all the terrible un-responsive emails.

gullevek 4y ago

The plain text email train has left and will never return. Everywhere it is HTML only. People expect that. Paste a Spreadsheet part from Excel, highlight something, bold something, inline images, etc. Quoting on top ... all bad things happen in mail first.

thomasedwards 4y ago

I‘ve had problems with plain text emails being treated as spam, but send the same content as HTML and it’s allowed through. I’d send more plain text emails, but it would cause more problems.

u801e 4y ago

The phrase "supports bottom posting" isn't the best way to describe formatting replies. Good netiquette typically involves deleting quoted text you're not directly addressing in your reply and type your responses inline. That is: > Quoted point 1 Response 1 > Quoted point 2 Response 2 and so on. Just quoting the entire original message and posting your reply at the bottom is as bad, if not worse, than just top posting.