71–80 of 345 posts
Some people sending plain text mails also wrap them manually. If my window is small (maybe because I am using a small screen), the text is painful to read. And a non manually wrapped plain text is not wrapped at all in some cases. By all means, send me plain text mails, it will be lighter for my self-hosted inbox, but don't wrap them manually. If you are going to abuse /this/ kind of `formatting`, however, you are ma…
I would like to read more details about "The former is strongly preferred". Why is plain text preferred and by whom?
>Plain text is sufficient for the vast majority of all non-advertising emails.
None of the emails I receive on a daily basis needed to be HTML. The main reason for it, is allowing people to use their company logo in the footer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Email is supposed to be easy to quote, just like you’ve used a block quote in your comment. I assume it’s obvious that rich text is difficult to quote, but a quick explanation is that the invisible formatting characters used to represent rich text behave inconsistently when re-contextualized for a quote.
> "Email is supposed to be easy to quote" Since when? I have never heard anyone say this in my entire life. I want emails to look good. So I guess people are different and we can't draw a simple conclusion about what people want from email?
The part about ProtonMail and Tutanota seems pretty biased. I would like to hear how the author suggests that they should implement IMAP and SMTP without compromising the encryption. It sounds like the author prefers dubious advantages to real improved security. That's quite ridiculous considering that according to him HTML emails are: >"... a security nightmare, are mostly used for advertising to you and tracking yo…
I'm on mobile so I can't give you an adequte response, but I can link you to a previous commment I wrote on the subject... Or I would, but pasting seems to be broken on my phone as well. If anyone can search HN for "Sir_Cmpwn Protonmail" and link the relevant comment I'd appreciate it very much.
I would like to read more details about "The former is strongly preferred". Why is plain text preferred and by whom?
There is info about it. "4. Why is plaintext better than HTML?"
I've also disabled wrapping (as recommended in that document), however I'm not a big fan of it. I do think that plain text wrapped at 72 or 80 characters looks much nicer. I wish thunderbird allowed me to select portions of the text to wrap, or to disable wrapping for selected portions (e.g. a code snippet). Is this handled better in other email clients?
I would like to read more details about "The former is strongly preferred". Why is plain text preferred and by whom?
Besides making phishing easier (by disguising links, unless you hover over them), what exactly does HTML add?
Most people simply bang out a bunch of text without any formatting: what does wrapping HTML around that add? I have yet to see a layman someone add useful typographic flourishes to any business communications. Any "advanced" formatting has always come from marketers.
Plaintext email is really troublesome if one wants to mail in an right-to-left language. There's simply no compatible way to override the direction/embedding without HTML * , so content is often scrambled. Many mailers won't even align to right automatically if all input is in an right-to-left language. In practice, HTML email is the only compatible way to get a semi-decent experience for these languages. * To answer…
Where are these characters stripped out? I can see that these create security issues with urls that get rendered with changed field order to look benign.
The result is that the only reasonable and compatible way to mix LTR (left-to-right, like English) and RTL (right-to-left, as with ME languages) is with HTML email. Note that in most cases rendering is an LTR context, so even sending RTL on its own will fare poorly.
Plaintext email is really troublesome if one wants to mail in an right-to-left language. There's simply no compatible way to override the direction/embedding without HTML * , so content is often scrambled. Many mailers won't even align to right automatically if all input is in an right-to-left language. In practice, HTML email is the only compatible way to get a semi-decent experience for these languages. * To answer…
Plaintext mailers completely mangle emails like this, making them beyond unreadable. Mutt to its credit does the best job.