Use plaintext email • Hacker News Board

Re: Use plaintext email

#101

Post by u801e » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 1:06 PM UTC

DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #22

jve wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair. I like that minimal formatting there anyway. But often I have to communicate via email, report on complex issues, etc. It is nice to have some headings, tables, images in there.

Agreed. As much as I like plain text email personally, having inline images etc. is really helpful sometimes.

Before MIME was common, people used to insert uuencoded data within the email message. IIRC, certain email clients would display the decoded content inline with the surrounding text.

Re: Use plaintext email

#102

Post by mrzool » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 1:06 PM UTC

bo1024 wrote: post #51

jraph wrote: post #45

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'm very sad about manual line wrapping too (since I love plain text otherwise), but unfortunately it's in the MIME standard. > Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF. Of course with HTML, your source code can adhere to this standard while still having arbitrarily long lines of text... https://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html

It’s an outdated standard and a terrible idea nowadays, since it makes emails unreadable on mobile devices. I’d really love to use plain-text emails — hell, I use plain text for everything — but they’re sadly not a good idea today, unless you want your emails looking like crap on every mobile device.

The suggestion to use `format=flowed` doesn’t help, as the standard is ill-supported: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/17/format-flowed/

I’ve researched the issue far and wide and the only way to have responsive, nicely wrapped emails is using HTML.

Re: Use plaintext email

#103

Post by upofadown » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 1:07 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #68

upofadown wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you are better off using some format that can stand alone as a file such as PDF. If it is a reference document that is intended to be edited on an ongoing basis it is better to use something like a wiki. Having to root around in your email to find a reference document is pretty inefficient and annoying.

All of the reasons given against HTML emails hold at least equally well against PDF: it's a vector for phishing and tracking, ripe with client vulnerabilities, less accessible and not displayable on a terminal. For me as a reader having to read both an E-Mail and the attached PDF is also annoying, and many people will simply skip reading the PDF.

If you have an employee generating phishing and tracking reference PDFs in your organization then you really have a personnel problem.

Re: Use plaintext email

#104

Post by _urga » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

upofadown wrote: post #99

>Mail client vulnerabilities Yeah, this is the part that is eventually going to bite us ... hard. It is just straight up insane to allow random entities access to the vast attack surface of a web browser. Unfortunately no one seems to even care about present day ongoing attacks. We will have to wait until someone comes up with a worm that takes down email and possibly the whole net.

MIME is hard enough:

https://snyk.io/blog/how-to-crash-an-email-server-with-a-sin...

Re: Use plaintext email

#105

Post by upofadown » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

lawn wrote: post #96

upofadown wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you are better off using some format that can stand alone as a file such as PDF. If it is a reference document that is intended to be edited on an ongoing basis it is better to use something like a wiki. Having to root around in your email to find a reference document is pretty inefficient and annoying.

We send syntax highlighted code all the time via email at my job. I hope you're not suggesting we should use PDF instead? And no, creating snippets on a wiki is also an extra unnecessary step. Email is just easier and faster.

Syntax highlighted code can hardly be considered a "reference document".

Re: Use plaintext email

#106

Post by tjoff » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

kungtotte wrote: post #90

tjoff wrote: post #87

Not having inline images is an issue though. It helps immensely with readability and usability. Especially with people that aren't as computer-savvy. Partly because many email-clients will list attachments below the mail content. And since it is standard practice to include the previous mail when responding you have to scroll a kilometer to get to the bottom with the attached images. That is just unusable. Yes, it is…

Maybe you should read the entire page? It specifically warns against top posting and quoting the entire email you're replying to. So if people followed this advice you wouldn't have to scroll a kilometer for attachments (unless someone actually wrote an email that long).

I don't know if I've ever seen bottom-posting in my life. They have particular weak arguments against that as well. It is very useful when forwarding a message or including someone else as cc.

Re: Use plaintext email

#107

Post by discreditable » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 1:12 PM UTC

u801e wrote: post #60

zaarn wrote: post #11

>HTML as a vector for phishing I would disagree, You can make Text-only links look fairly harmless too. The issue is more often that people do not look at all, even in text-mail, what the link points to, not that they can't see it (plus you can hover and the browser still shows the URL once you open it) >Privacy invasion and tracking Only if you use an ancient and outdated client that doesn't block external resources…

> You can make Text-only links look fairly harmless too. Could you give an example? As far as I know, you cannot do something like making a link look like it belongs to a completely different domain.

glyphs that look similar in most fonts: appIIe[.]com payaI[.]com

They look different in monospace, but I know Gmail renders plaintext mail with a normal sans-serif.

You can also just spell things mildly wrong. People often auto-correct spelling in their mind without realizing it, ex: microsott[.]com

Note I added [] to avoid linking the sites. Those domains look like they're squatted by suspicious customers already.

Re: Use plaintext email

#108

Post by jedicoffee » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

Drew, no. - Will

Re: Use plaintext email

#109

Post by yyyk » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

u801e wrote: post #60

zaarn wrote: post #11

>HTML as a vector for phishing I would disagree, You can make Text-only links look fairly harmless too. The issue is more often that people do not look at all, even in text-mail, what the link points to, not that they can't see it (plus you can hover and the browser still shows the URL once you open it) >Privacy invasion and tracking Only if you use an ancient and outdated client that doesn't block external resources…

> You can make Text-only links look fairly harmless too. Could you give an example? As far as I know, you cannot do something like making a link look like it belongs to a completely different domain.

There are a lot of homoglyph url tricks. It turns out there are even online attack generators for these, so you can see for yourself:

https://www.irongeek.com/homoglyph-attack-generator.php

https://adlinkurl.com/blog/2-homoglyph-url-spoofer

Re: Use plaintext email

#110

Post by mbreese » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 1:15 PM UTC

owenmarshall wrote: post #89

tqwhite wrote: post #83

What a load of bollocks. The arguments against come down to, 'you are an idiot who can't figure out phishing links' and, well, that's it. Something about marketing emails. Stupid. Luddite. I'm surprised they don't insist you use a monospace type face in your email reader to give it that late eighties feel. I have always used HTML email, even when it was new and poorly supported. I want people who read my email to see…

I think this opinion is strongly worded and might get some heat, but I think you touch on something important. Plaintext email often serves as an in group shibboleth to distinguish “us” from “the other lusers”. Does it have merit beyond that, or do these articles just reinforce that?

I think the main issue at play here is quoting. In particular, how bad rich text/html mail programs are at dealing with inline quoting. In my opinion, that’s the main “feature” of email communication that has been lost over the years. On the top replies make it difficult to follow a nested thread of emails.

If html email clients handled this better, I don’t think there would be as much of a problem. I think you’re right though that plain text acts as a bit of a shibboleth to differentiate “advanced” users vs luddites. But the main thing that I’ve heard people complain about with respect to html email is the loss of inline quoting.

Plaintext has its issues too— in particular long line soft wrapping. Which some would argue would be better supported if html email hadn’t become so popular.