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Use plaintext email

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Re: Use plaintext email

#151

Post by zepolen »

bwat49 wrote: post #144
zepolen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

images loading..2% images loading..15% images loading..29% images loading..42% images loading..58% images loading..74% images loading..89% images loading..100% ____________________________________ | | | O O | | O | | \_/ | | MY LOGO | | My catchphrase | | | | | | | |------------------------------------| | | | Hi josho! | | | | This is why it's slower to read! | | | |____________________________________|

A decent email client will load images asynchronously. Many can also be configured to not load remote content at all until you allow it.

So loading the text part of emails only. That's precisely the topic of discussion.

Re: Use plaintext email

#152

Post by bachmeier »

jeffalyanak wrote: post #140
josho wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither you nor the poster provide a reason why. Why is it better? How does plain text make it faster to respond? Or even faster to read?

A well formatted html email has the potential to be much more readable than any plaintext one. The issues come in execution. I find that a very large percentage of the html email I receive is actually hurting readability by way of formatting. On top of that, a sizable percentage who send html email fail to take accessibility into account and leave out important elements like alt tags.

> I find that a very large percentage of the html email I receive is actually hurting readability by way of formatting.

This is exactly right. In principle, html is just as convenient, but in practice it regularly fails. Something I really hate is a message with big images that add nothing. If I have to scan a message to figure out what's being said, there's a high probability I will leave it for later, which means it never gets read at all.

Re: Use plaintext email

#153

Post by scbrg »

tjoff wrote: post #106
kungtotte wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is very useful for you, the sender. It is a nightmare for the receiver. Whenever I receive one of those forwarded top posted thirty mail long horrors I just ignore everything and hope I can guess context from whatever you wrote in the last email. The alternative is to spend an hour deciphering the blob of goo that is actual mail messages mixed with signatures, attachments, all being meaningless replies to questions I haven't yet read - because top posting.

Sending me such a thing is equivalent to telling me "Fuck you, your time is worth nothing to me."

Re: Use plaintext email

#154

Post by zczc »

jve wrote: post #8

> Rich text features desirable for end users include things like inline images, bold or italicized text, and so on. However, the tradeoff isn't worth it. Images can simply be attached to your email, and you can employ things like asterisks , /slashes/, _underscores_, or UPPERCASE for emphasis. Well, why bother writing his own post in rich text then? He has headings, bold, links, grey font at the bottom, image. Don't…

You can use markdown with https://markdown-here.com/. It allows composing emails in markdown and sending email as multipart message with plain text markdown plus rendered html. Discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15646425

Re: Use plaintext email

#155

Post by neuronic »

u801e wrote: post #147
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…

> Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. Yet, you cannot do any of that on HN (other than a limited case like italic ). But, we can communicate just fine without those features. I suppose it's really a difference of a read once message versus having a discussion. In a read once message, you can format it like you describe. That's…

Communicating just fine is not the same as communicating at optimum.

In the analog world, you could just hand over a white, plaintext birthday card. Or you could give one with a motive, color, some doodles and maybe a memorable photograph attached.

Which one is more memorable?

"It's used by marketing." is not an arguments against it. We have sophisticated spam filters. Update your rules then.

Re: Use plaintext email

#156

Post by hunter2_ »

glenneroo wrote: post #137
munmaek wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want your formatted html, nor does my client render it. You can attach screenshots or link to them. > There's no good reason to There's no good reason for using anything other than plaintext in email. You can use slack, riot, or other chatrooms for the rest.

Our offices don't use any of that chatroom crud and I'm extremely thankful for the lack of extra imposed distractions, not to mention the horror stories of being reachable 24/7 because of Slack/Riot/etc. Why require another medium for communication when email works just fine? What is the point in joining a chatroom to talk to one person only to be spammed by everyone else in the room? For those cases where email is i…

> being reachable 24/7

Email and phone are in the same boat, or none of them if you simply turn off the alerts.

> another medium for communication when email works just fine

When the topic at hand can only be resolved by many round trips, chat is faster because you don't bounce through different interfaces to read vs type.

> talk to one person only to be spammed by everyone else in the room

Direct message, not a room.

> walking over and talking or making a phone/video call

That is much more likely (perhaps even guaranteed) to be an interrupt, while chat allows the recipient to choose precisely what things interrupt them.

Re: Use plaintext email

#157

Post by zepolen »

neuronic wrote: post #155
u801e wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. Yet, you cannot do any of that on HN (other than a limited case like italic ). But, we can communicate just fine without those features. I suppose it's really a difference of a read once message versus having a discussion. In a read once message, you can format it like you describe. That's…

Communicating just fine is not the same as communicating at optimum. In the analog world, you could just hand over a white, plaintext birthday card. Or you could give one with a motive, color, some doodles and maybe a memorable photograph attached. Which one is more memorable? "It's used by marketing." is not an arguments against it. We have sophisticated spam filters. Update your rules then.

Go and visit a forum where embedded images are allowed and tell me that there is any sort of "optimum" discussion over there.

In the end what happens is people use text overlays in the IMAGES in order to reply to each other.

Since you edited your response to mention the birthday card:

Yea - on the one hand you can leave a boring "Happy Birthday" message with lots of glitter to make it memorable.

Or you can make the message memorable.

Re: Use plaintext email

#158

Post by u801e »

chapium wrote: post #98
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…

hard wrap at 72 characters seems pretty conservative

The reason it's 72 characters is to allow for quoted text, which gets indented relative to the new text. That would allow a line in an email that's 72 characters long to still fit within 80 characters if it's prefixed with 8 quote characters. For example:

>>>>>>>>This line was 72 characters long, but is now 80 characters long instead.

Re: Use plaintext email

#159

Post by tqwhite »

ddevault wrote: post #116
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…

People who fall for phishing are not idiots. Even technical people can be fooled by clever spear phishing.

You're right. That was too strongly said. Some people are naive or make a mistake. However, nobody I know lacks for emphatic instruction to never, ever click a link on an email. If your bank wants you to login, use your own bookmark.

Re: Use plaintext email

#160

Post by yoz-y »

Who does this page cater to though? The recommended tools are programs that are packaged for Linux or need compiling[1]. If they want to convince anybody who already does not prefer plaintext then they should be targeting the Windows and macOS crowd.

[1]: Later some tools such as thunderbird or configuration for Apple Mail and Gmail are mentioned. They should be top and center.

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