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It seems like most of this works fine with browsers and MUAs separate. I can still copy text from webpages into emails and open links in tabs and add sites to m

It seems like most of this works fine with browsers and MUAs separate. I can still copy text from webpages into emails and open links in tabs and add sites to my browser's bookmarks with very little friction. Personally, and I realize I'm probably an outlier here, but I want to keep my email as far away from my web browser and the internet as possible, unless I'm being very deliberate. If I open an email, I want all remotely hosted content blocked, I don't want JS to run, I'd prefer even the most basic HTML stripped out entirely and the message presented as plain text. The more interconnected my mail client and browser are, the more I'd fear an errant click could result in a loss of security and/or privacy. Email is toxic, and I really want it quarantined.

derekkraan 3y ago
If you're an outlier then I am also an outlier. To my great annoyance, the text version of many emails is broken, I see unfilled template variables all over the place.
- distcs 3y ago
  Another outlier here. Glad to see there are other like minded people on this thread. While viewing emails on the web interface I use the email provider setting to block images from loading. That along with an ad blocker and JS blocker does a good job. You are right that the text versions of many emails are terribly broken. I don't think the text versions are paid attention to anymore. I have been on the other side sending out mailers to our customers and while working with mailer systems I realized that the de facto way of working these days is to compose an HTML email and let the mailer system strip out all the HTML tags to create the text version. Of course that leads to terrible text versions of the emails.
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    Yet another outlier, and I’ve experienced a similar problem in a different way. I actually use email-to-RSS with a dedicated reader to further compartmentalize myself, and I’ve found so many needlessly mutilated plain text newsletters. I don’t understand it. Maybe some notion that HTML/CSS/JS in emails increases turnover? In some cases I get it, for instance my local grocer probably benefits heavily from all the pretty pictures and hyperlinks. However my local news org sends out almost entirely HTML-formatted “plain” text, so that just seems like useless effort. And if its because the automated mail systems use it as defaults, that makes a lot of sense.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Mutt for instance can use Lynx to render HTML content in the background, you just read the rendered result as text.
- bregma 3y ago
  Email is a text medium. If someone can't be arsed to communicate properly in a medium, then they're just poor communicators. If I can't read the text of an email, it's just spam and goes directly in the trash. I already have a full inbox; the decision is easy.
  - tzs 3y ago
    > Email is a text medium That fight was doomed from the moment it got named "email". With that name people were going to expect "email" to be like postal mail but online. With postal mail we can use any fonts and styles and colors that we can put on paper by hand or that our word processors can put on paper. We can include graphs and tables and images. We can even send files by putting them on physical media that is small enough to fit in our envelope. And so it was pretty much inevitable that email would get the ability to handle all that too, as soon as both of these conditions came to pass: (1) the Internet became widespread in the general population and (2) common office and home computers became sufficiently capable to reasonably handle fancy documents.
  - tomjen3 3y ago
    My email is better when quotes are colored differently, when links are clickable and when tabular data is presented as such. I define better in the Aristotelian sense - the emails job is to convey information into my brain and my argument is that properly formatted email is better than nonformatted email at this task. Your email client may already do some, or all of this with plain text in which case it is essentially an (incomplete, partial, non-compatible) markdown render. But why not have a standard for how to render email that works with 99.9% of readers? Well we do have that, and the standard is HTML. It's ugly if you look at it, but it works and that is better than being theoretical and clean, no? I mean I want to send LaTeX that adapt to the readers screen, or AsciiDoc, but that isn't going to happen. While we could idealize about dispatching LaTeX content that can dynamically adapt to the recipient's screen size, or fantasize about the use of AsciiDoc, the reality is that such alternatives are not broadly supported and hence are currently unfeasible. I do agree with you about blocking external images by default.
- necrotic_comp 3y ago
  Using https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard, you can set it up so that you can view html emails in your browser with a keystroke. I've found it's the best of both worlds, since i don't really use HTML email, but I like being able to look and see what's been sent to me.
adrian_b 3y ago
I have similar requirements for a MUA, and I find Claws Mail adequate, as it behaves exactly as you say. It needs explicit actions for downloading attachments and images or for viewing the HTML version in a browser.
- autoexec 3y ago
  It looks good! My one complaint would be that it doesn't save messages in MBOX format (I do see that it has an import option and a plugin for reading MBOX files however)
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    I prefer a lot the e-mail messages that are saved as individual plain text files, grouped in directories. In this case it is trivial to do, even without any MUA, any operations like exporting, importing, searching, moving, deleting, extracting and so on, either manually or with scripts. I have seen in the past problems with certain MUAs that had an obfuscated mailbox format, where the mailbox was a black hole that captured your messages, which were very difficult to export and import into another MUA, if a change was desired or if the original MUA became corrupted.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      The main advantage of MBOX files is that you only have one file per mail folder and all the filenames are known and constant no matter how much mail comes in. It means if you have a ton of mail you aren't dealing with massive numbers of tiny files. The files are still plain text and contain the bodies and full headers for each message so I can use grep or even perl to pull information from them easily. Exporting into other formats can still be tricky though because not everyone can handle MBOX and there are variations.
afb_etc 3y ago
I'm with you there. I use Mutt to read my mail as plain text, and have mu4e if I need to see an image in an email or whatever. Thunderbird is there if I desperately need an email to be a web page, for some reason.
can16358p 3y ago
I'm an outlier too then. I want to keep email away from everything as much as possible. I also want a web browser to be a web browser, not something that "contains" other apps. For mail I want to open my mail client, not web browser. Having an integrated email client into a browser is really like a cheap Windows computer prebundled with crapware and malware.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  It's not easy to find a good E-Mail client for Windows. I had to help a friend who is not good with computers, and in the end we settled for Fastmail, because we couldn't find a native client that worked acceptably. What's your recommendation?
  - jeltz 3y ago
    Thunderbird. It is still the greatest email client. It has some issues with huge mailboxes but no other client I have tried even come close to the convenience of using Thunderbird.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      We tried Thunderbird, but it was just not user-friendly enough to be suitable. The tabbed interface and strange pop-up windows were confusing in an e-mail client. But I'm sure it is a great client on Windows for more computer-literate people.
  - can16358p 3y ago
    I don't know. I use the bare minimum for email and I live in the Apple ecosystem with iCloud mail so the stock Mail app is more than enough for me. Definitely less featured but I don't need the extras anyway.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      Yes the stock Mail.app is excellent and what I use, but try convincing somebody who is not a computer professional to get a Mac...
nelblu 3y ago
Another outlier here too. I find that fairemail app on android is absolutely the best when it comes to things like ensuring no external links are auto loaded, and email is rendered as pure text with minimal markup.

derekkraan 3y ago

If you're an outlier then I am also an outlier. To my great annoyance, the text version of many emails is broken, I see unfilled template variables all over the place.

distcs 3y ago
Another outlier here. Glad to see there are other like minded people on this thread. While viewing emails on the web interface I use the email provider setting to block images from loading. That along with an ad blocker and JS blocker does a good job. You are right that the text versions of many emails are terribly broken. I don't think the text versions are paid attention to anymore. I have been on the other side sending out mailers to our customers and while working with mailer systems I realized that the de facto way of working these days is to compose an HTML email and let the mailer system strip out all the HTML tags to create the text version. Of course that leads to terrible text versions of the emails.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  Yet another outlier, and I’ve experienced a similar problem in a different way. I actually use email-to-RSS with a dedicated reader to further compartmentalize myself, and I’ve found so many needlessly mutilated plain text newsletters. I don’t understand it. Maybe some notion that HTML/CSS/JS in emails increases turnover? In some cases I get it, for instance my local grocer probably benefits heavily from all the pretty pictures and hyperlinks. However my local news org sends out almost entirely HTML-formatted “plain” text, so that just seems like useless effort. And if its because the automated mail systems use it as defaults, that makes a lot of sense.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Mutt for instance can use Lynx to render HTML content in the background, you just read the rendered result as text.
bregma 3y ago
Email is a text medium. If someone can't be arsed to communicate properly in a medium, then they're just poor communicators. If I can't read the text of an email, it's just spam and goes directly in the trash. I already have a full inbox; the decision is easy.
- tzs 3y ago
  > Email is a text medium That fight was doomed from the moment it got named "email". With that name people were going to expect "email" to be like postal mail but online. With postal mail we can use any fonts and styles and colors that we can put on paper by hand or that our word processors can put on paper. We can include graphs and tables and images. We can even send files by putting them on physical media that is small enough to fit in our envelope. And so it was pretty much inevitable that email would get the ability to handle all that too, as soon as both of these conditions came to pass: (1) the Internet became widespread in the general population and (2) common office and home computers became sufficiently capable to reasonably handle fancy documents.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  My email is better when quotes are colored differently, when links are clickable and when tabular data is presented as such. I define better in the Aristotelian sense - the emails job is to convey information into my brain and my argument is that properly formatted email is better than nonformatted email at this task. Your email client may already do some, or all of this with plain text in which case it is essentially an (incomplete, partial, non-compatible) markdown render. But why not have a standard for how to render email that works with 99.9% of readers? Well we do have that, and the standard is HTML. It's ugly if you look at it, but it works and that is better than being theoretical and clean, no? I mean I want to send LaTeX that adapt to the readers screen, or AsciiDoc, but that isn't going to happen. While we could idealize about dispatching LaTeX content that can dynamically adapt to the recipient's screen size, or fantasize about the use of AsciiDoc, the reality is that such alternatives are not broadly supported and hence are currently unfeasible. I do agree with you about blocking external images by default.
necrotic_comp 3y ago
Using https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard, you can set it up so that you can view html emails in your browser with a keystroke. I've found it's the best of both worlds, since i don't really use HTML email, but I like being able to look and see what's been sent to me.

adrian_b 3y ago

I have similar requirements for a MUA, and I find Claws Mail adequate, as it behaves exactly as you say. It needs explicit actions for downloading attachments and images or for viewing the HTML version in a browser.

autoexec 3y ago
It looks good! My one complaint would be that it doesn't save messages in MBOX format (I do see that it has an import option and a plugin for reading MBOX files however)
- adrian_b 3y ago
  I prefer a lot the e-mail messages that are saved as individual plain text files, grouped in directories. In this case it is trivial to do, even without any MUA, any operations like exporting, importing, searching, moving, deleting, extracting and so on, either manually or with scripts. I have seen in the past problems with certain MUAs that had an obfuscated mailbox format, where the mailbox was a black hole that captured your messages, which were very difficult to export and import into another MUA, if a change was desired or if the original MUA became corrupted.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    The main advantage of MBOX files is that you only have one file per mail folder and all the filenames are known and constant no matter how much mail comes in. It means if you have a ton of mail you aren't dealing with massive numbers of tiny files. The files are still plain text and contain the bodies and full headers for each message so I can use grep or even perl to pull information from them easily. Exporting into other formats can still be tricky though because not everyone can handle MBOX and there are variations.

afb_etc 3y ago

I'm with you there. I use Mutt to read my mail as plain text, and have mu4e if I need to see an image in an email or whatever. Thunderbird is there if I desperately need an email to be a web page, for some reason.

can16358p 3y ago

I'm an outlier too then. I want to keep email away from everything as much as possible. I also want a web browser to be a web browser, not something that "contains" other apps. For mail I want to open my mail client, not web browser. Having an integrated email client into a browser is really like a cheap Windows computer prebundled with crapware and malware.

carlosjobim 3y ago
It's not easy to find a good E-Mail client for Windows. I had to help a friend who is not good with computers, and in the end we settled for Fastmail, because we couldn't find a native client that worked acceptably. What's your recommendation?
- jeltz 3y ago
  Thunderbird. It is still the greatest email client. It has some issues with huge mailboxes but no other client I have tried even come close to the convenience of using Thunderbird.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    We tried Thunderbird, but it was just not user-friendly enough to be suitable. The tabbed interface and strange pop-up windows were confusing in an e-mail client. But I'm sure it is a great client on Windows for more computer-literate people.
- can16358p 3y ago
  I don't know. I use the bare minimum for email and I live in the Apple ecosystem with iCloud mail so the stock Mail app is more than enough for me. Definitely less featured but I don't need the extras anyway.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Yes the stock Mail.app is excellent and what I use, but try convincing somebody who is not a computer professional to get a Mac...

nelblu 3y ago

Another outlier here too. I find that fairemail app on android is absolutely the best when it comes to things like ensuring no external links are auto loaded, and email is rendered as pure text with minimal markup.