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Use plaintext email

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Re: Use plaintext email

#121

Post by kgwxd »

taneq wrote: post #111
wongarsu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But emails can be reference documents too! In fact I would argue most work emails that are longer than a few lines are a reference document of some sort.

Exactly, work mailboxes are a treasure trove of automatically-archived information. I'd argue that these days, emails form more of a "knowledge base" than any other single repository of information for most organisations.

This is very true and yet the search tools supplied with these knowledge bases are terribly inadequate. Is there a better, standalone tool out there for turning email archives, from multiple sources, into a usable database with a powerful query language?

Re: Use plaintext email

#122

Post by cpbotha »

mrzool wrote: post #102
bo1024 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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It’s an outdated standard and a terrible idea nowadays, since it makes emails unreadable on mobile devices.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…

This is the one blemish (in my view) on fastmail's record. I love them otherwise.

I initially came to the same conclusion as you, but after receiving one too many badly quoted HTML emails (and after some lost hours unsuccessfully trying to understand how fastmail web, gmail, thunderbird and ios mail.app do HTML quoting (hint: they're all subtly different)), I decided to double-down on format=flowed.

Re: Use plaintext email

#123

Post by na85 »

atombender wrote: post #36

The problems with HTML email originate in the days when clients like Outlook would produce horrendous, non-responsive HTML that were basically entire embedded web pages; the idea that the sender should be able to dictate the font of an email is a bit ridiculous, not to mention the layout, and the result was often broken depending on the email client. Emails aren't web pages, but they do benefit from formatting (bold,…

>We can keep full HTML for fancy marketing emails, but letter-form email should be simple and impossible to abuse.

You had me convinced up until this part. Marketing emails are, IME, the most prone to being abusive. If anyone deserves to have their fingers rapped every time they try to get fancy with HTML mail, it's the scumbags that send marketing email (which is by definition spam).

Re: Use plaintext email

#124

Post by ubermonkey »

My god, this is never going to die, is it?

I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED.

And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication.

It's done. I'm not going back to plaintext, and I can't imagine most people will, either. There's no good reason to (in particular, the downfalls of HTML the author lists are all either easily solved or are issues orthogonal to the format of the email.)

Re: Use plaintext email

#126

Post by gdfasfklshg4 »

upofadown wrote: post #115
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…

>If my window is small (maybe because I am using a small screen), the text is painful to read. If your screen is so small that it can't display 80 characters across then pretty much anything you look at it with is going to look odd. Any HTML formatting such as tables will also be painful to read.

Have you ever seen someone with poor eyesight use a smart phone?

Re: Use plaintext email

#127

Post by ksahin »

> HTML emails are mainly used for marketing - that is, emails you probably don't want to see in the first place

Wait what?

Maybe you're subscribed to the wrong newsletter, but in my case, I'm subscribed to products / brand I like, I'm aware that I will receive advertisement / product updates and I'm fine with it !

Re: Use plaintext email

#128

Post by bachmeier »

ubermonkey wrote: post #124

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…

> There's no good reason to

I used html for years. Once my email volume reached a certain point, I went back to plain text because I can read it and respond to it much faster.

Re: Use plaintext email

#129

Post by rusk »

upofadown wrote: post #115
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…

>If my window is small (maybe because I am using a small screen), the text is painful to read. If your screen is so small that it can't display 80 characters across then pretty much anything you look at it with is going to look odd. Any HTML formatting such as tables will also be painful to read.

You’re missing the point that anything longer than 80 chars is harder for the human. Ideally it should be 65.

That said, wrapping is better left to the mail client, and let the user adjust their window to suit. My chief gripe at this point is that some email clients (gmail anyway) will get confused by outsized inline images and wrap on them, even if that means letting text drift off the side of the screen!

Re: Use plaintext email

#130

Post by omaranto »

It seems to me this webpage uses "bottom-posting" to include both what Wikipedia [1] calls bottom-posting and what it calls interleaved posting or inline replying. For example, in the section called "Top posting", the webpage advises you to "Write anything you have to say underneath the quote it pertains to.", which is interleaved posting (unless you only quote one thing).

Is this abuse of language common? Am I actually on the side of bottom-posters because they really mean "write anything you have to say underneath the quote it pertains to" rather than "reply to everything at the bottom"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style

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