2 ms·

I have been doing that for plaintext emails. Whenever I receive an HTML-only email (that my email reader cannot open), I send a kind email to the company, askin

by palata 2y ago

I have been doing that for plaintext emails. Whenever I receive an HTML-only email (that my email reader cannot open), I send a kind email to the company, asking if they could consider adding a plaintext version next to it. I clearly explain that they can keep the HTML version as a default, and that some people need plaintext for accessibility and security reasons. I often receive answers, that surprised me! People saying "thank you for your suggestion, we will think about what we can do". None of them has every changed anything (I've been doing that for years). I don't even know if they did anything more than answering to the email.

rednafi 2y ago
Interesting. I didn’t even know you could do it. I wonder how to do that in a mainstream email client like Gmail on the web.
- palata 2y ago
  GMail sends both HTML and plaintext versions by default.
  - account42 2y ago
    It does however do so using an automated HTML to text conversion that you could also just do in your client so it's not really all that helpful.
n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
Thus is a pet peeve of mine. Some companies send an multi-part E-Mail, just for the plain text part to be an empty string. Why bother? Pretty often the plain text is just the same html, so you get to read raw ugly html. Do people not test this?
- rwky 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure they don't test them. I got a good one the other day from a well known institution. It was a bill and the html part said I owed N amount but the plain text said 0.00. By default I read the plain text part but when I saw it says 0.00 I thought it was odd so checked the html and there it was the correct amount!
  - n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
    That would imply developers/testers default to reading html-formatted text, which I honestly find hard to believe.
magpi3 2y ago
Honest question: wouldn't it be simpler for text-only email readers to have plugins that runs HTML-only emails through a command that converts the HTML to text?
- palata 2y ago
  I don't think so. If you print the HTML, it's often full of " ", images and links unrelated to the actual content. It's hard to extract the meaningful part of that pile of stuff in a trustworthy way (and you wouldn't want to lose information). Also many of those emails are autogenerated. So the template has to be done once, and that's it. And it should be trivial for whoever composes the HTML email to copy-paste the important part into a text-only version. Maybe it would actually help them think about what the important part actually is.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - account42 2y ago
    Decoding   and other entities should be part of converting the HTML to text. This is absolutely basic. > So the template has to be done once, and that's it. Except the world is not static and then when the HTML template gets updated they'll forget the text template and now you are missing vital information. Perhaps even legally required information like unsubscribe links. Supporting text email only makes sense if that will actually be tested. Otherwise you are better of just rendering the HTML to text locally. That's going to lose you less information than a forgotten text mail template.
    - palata 2y ago
      I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that they make my email experience worse by only sending HTML, and most (all?) of the time, it's absolutely unnecessary. And again, HTML brings security concerns.
- WhyNotHugo 2y ago
geor9e 2y ago
I don't mean to sound super callous - but what? I have so many questions, as someone who uses screen readers a lot. How are you browsing HN - it's not like websites maintain a separate .txt file for the blind. When you click "Read aloud" in a browser (or whatever the inbuilt screenreader calls it), thanks to the structure of the html DOM it can find the main txt. Since your email client can't open most emails, you still have no idea what people said to you? Coworkers ignored, bills unpaid. Instead, you've just been scolding the senders for years, and admit you've not had one single success from it? Even if everyone changed, and you got dual format back for every email, would the senders be manually creating both, or would they just let software convert one to the other? If software, then as a general computer science infra question, for scaling, should that computation be run on the 99% of cases that never use it, or should it just be run at the 1% of endpoints that use it? Are you on an ARPANET PDP-10? You're shifting the burden onto hundreds of non-technical email writers, shaming them for not catering to your niche desire for dual format emails (gmail doesn't even do this), when your email reader could just enter the 90s era. Hackers make computers do things despite it all. If you created that email client, there are many open source tools for you to do html2txt in one line. pandoc for one.
- palata 2y ago
  > I don't mean to sound super callous Right, let me answer in a tone that I find similar to yours. > gmail doesn't even do this How the hell did you test that? Gmail sends goddamn plaintext together with HTML. If you can't be arsed to even check that, why should I even answer to the rest? You've completely ignored the security aspect of it, but I guess you have similarly "not super callous" opinions about that. Don't bother, I don't care to read them.

by palata 2y ago

rednafi 2y ago

Interesting. I didn’t even know you could do it. I wonder how to do that in a mainstream email client like Gmail on the web.

palata 2y ago
GMail sends both HTML and plaintext versions by default.
- account42 2y ago
  It does however do so using an automated HTML to text conversion that you could also just do in your client so it's not really all that helpful.

n_plus_1_acc 2y ago

Thus is a pet peeve of mine. Some companies send an multi-part E-Mail, just for the plain text part to be an empty string. Why bother? Pretty often the plain text is just the same html, so you get to read raw ugly html. Do people not test this?

rwky 2y ago
I'm pretty sure they don't test them. I got a good one the other day from a well known institution. It was a bill and the html part said I owed N amount but the plain text said 0.00. By default I read the plain text part but when I saw it says 0.00 I thought it was odd so checked the html and there it was the correct amount!
- n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
  That would imply developers/testers default to reading html-formatted text, which I honestly find hard to believe.

magpi3 2y ago

Honest question: wouldn't it be simpler for text-only email readers to have plugins that runs HTML-only emails through a command that converts the HTML to text?

palata 2y ago
I don't think so. If you print the HTML, it's often full of " ", images and links unrelated to the actual content. It's hard to extract the meaningful part of that pile of stuff in a trustworthy way (and you wouldn't want to lose information). Also many of those emails are autogenerated. So the template has to be done once, and that's it. And it should be trivial for whoever composes the HTML email to copy-paste the important part into a text-only version. Maybe it would actually help them think about what the important part actually is.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- account42 2y ago
  Decoding   and other entities should be part of converting the HTML to text. This is absolutely basic. > So the template has to be done once, and that's it. Except the world is not static and then when the HTML template gets updated they'll forget the text template and now you are missing vital information. Perhaps even legally required information like unsubscribe links. Supporting text email only makes sense if that will actually be tested. Otherwise you are better of just rendering the HTML to text locally. That's going to lose you less information than a forgotten text mail template.
  - palata 2y ago
    I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that they make my email experience worse by only sending HTML, and most (all?) of the time, it's absolutely unnecessary. And again, HTML brings security concerns.
WhyNotHugo 2y ago

geor9e 2y ago

I don't mean to sound super callous - but what? I have so many questions, as someone who uses screen readers a lot. How are you browsing HN - it's not like websites maintain a separate .txt file for the blind. When you click "Read aloud" in a browser (or whatever the inbuilt screenreader calls it), thanks to the structure of the html DOM it can find the main txt. Since your email client can't open most emails, you still have no idea what people said to you? Coworkers ignored, bills unpaid. Instead, you've just been scolding the senders for years, and admit you've not had one single success from it? Even if everyone changed, and you got dual format back for every email, would the senders be manually creating both, or would they just let software convert one to the other? If software, then as a general computer science infra question, for scaling, should that computation be run on the 99% of cases that never use it, or should it just be run at the 1% of endpoints that use it? Are you on an ARPANET PDP-10? You're shifting the burden onto hundreds of non-technical email writers, shaming them for not catering to your niche desire for dual format emails (gmail doesn't even do this), when your email reader could just enter the 90s era. Hackers make computers do things despite it all. If you created that email client, there are many open source tools for you to do html2txt in one line. pandoc for one.

palata 2y ago
> I don't mean to sound super callous Right, let me answer in a tone that I find similar to yours. > gmail doesn't even do this How the hell did you test that? Gmail sends goddamn plaintext together with HTML. If you can't be arsed to even check that, why should I even answer to the rest? You've completely ignored the security aspect of it, but I guess you have similarly "not super callous" opinions about that. Don't bother, I don't care to read them.