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I personally use plaintext for all my email, largely because I want people to be able to choose whichever font they'd like to read my email, but also because I
by tombert 3y ago
I personally use plaintext for all my email, largely because I want people to be able to choose whichever font they'd like to read my email, but also because I want people reading my email to know there's no hidden bullshit like tracking pixels or images or anything crazy like that. In a very literal sense, I feel with plaintext email, what you see is what you get.
Sadly, it's getting increasingly hard to work entirely in text mode for email nowadays; people don't have any issues reading my text mail but almost 0% of all my incoming email is plaintext compatible; for mutt I have to run most of my emails through w3m before reading them, which isn't a huge deal but I kind of wish people would just send plaintext unless they have a specific reason not to.
- hk1337 3y agoI don't think that's what they're referring to. I think it's referring to the view in the browser. The email contents itself might still be html/rich text and/or plaintext but viewing in the browser, you have to use the new Gmail UI instead of the original Gmail HTML Basic.
- tombert 3y agoYeah, fair enough; that's what I get for not actually clicking the link before commenting. My dumb fault.
- NegativeK 3y agoI had to tell a CTO that we can't do plaintext marketing/communication emails because they're much less effective for the average user. I feel like they died a little that day. You, the CTO, and I all prefer plaintext emails, but we're very much the minority.
- tombert 3y agoYeah... It doesn't affect me, but there are objective reasons for letting people choose their own fonts. My dad has dyslexia and generally has an easier time reading Comic Sans than other fonts. For (I think) obvious reasons his company isn't going to start sending all their HTML-formatted emails in Comic Sans, which means he artificially has to spend more time reading emails than he might otherwise, unless he wants to copypaste the message bodies into MSWord and convert it.
- quickthrower2 3y agoIs he reading them in the browser? There has to be an extension to fix that!
- niutech 3y agoStylish with user styles.
- tomjen3 3y agoPlaintext emails mean no inline pictures, no colours, no links and no tables. What we lose is simply not worth it for the point 1% of people who use mutt.
- zzo38computer 3y agoI don't want email messages with, inline pictures, colours, and links that obscure their target. (I also don't want emoji.) Tables can still be made in plain text if necessary. (I use a email client that does not even support HTML email, so it is displayed as plain text anyways. If you send it as both (which some programs do), then it can be possible to configure the client (if it can be configured as such) to display it as plain text.)
- eviks 3y agoTables can't be made in plain text, they'll break on reflow (very common in this day and age to have devices of various widths), also it's harder to do tables by hand Sending as both: what happens to clients that can't be configured as such?
- tombert 3y agoI mentioned in a sister comment, one advantage of plaintext email, regardless of your client, is that they can be viewed in any font you'd like. There are fonts that are a bit more accessible to people with dyslexia like Comic Sans which companies aren't going to just randomly start sending emails in.
- eviks 3y agoCan you not override the font in the client?
- palata 3y ago> What we lose is simply not worth it Can we take a step back and think about what we "win" with "inline pictures, colours, links and tables"? > for the point 1% of people who use mutt. It's not only using mutt. There are actually quite a few things that you lose by using HTML e-mails. You just don't know them, and so you consider that the way you use e-mail is the best. Not saying that you are wrong, and maybe 99% of users actually don't want to use e-mail like those 1% you mention. But before you say so, it would be great if you considered those use-cases that you don't know. Because maybe those 1% using mutt have a valid point :-).
- zzo38computer 3y agoI do work entirely in text mode for email. However, I do not receive much email messages and those that I do, they know I want plain text. Even if they have to use a program with only HTML to send, if the message is simple enough then it is still readable enough anyways, fortunately.