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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

by 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.
    - blueflow 4y ago
      I think you need to patch your client to decode that, in the same vein it needs to be able to decode base64-encoded bodies.
dmitriid 4y ago
> Some companies have given up on plain text completely. I'm getting these kind of messages now To make maters worse, there's now AMP for email, https://amp.dev/about/email/ https://amp.dev/about/email/

by cube00 4y ago

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.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    I think you need to patch your client to decode that, in the same vein it needs to be able to decode base64-encoded bodies.

dmitriid 4y ago

> Some companies have given up on plain text completely. I'm getting these kind of messages now To make maters worse, there's now AMP for email, https://amp.dev/about/email/ https://amp.dev/about/email/