Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Use plaintext email

useplaintext.email

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 345 posts

Re: Use plaintext email

#161

Post by bo1024 »

_urga wrote: post #100
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

The RFC you quoted actually refers to line lengths within a MIME message as a whole (headers and body), and only after Content-Transfer-Encoding has been applied, not before. In other words, your text parts can have lines of arbitrary line length, provided you encode them as QuotedPrintable or Base64 and set the Content-Transfer-Encoding header accordingly, which most email clients do.

Thanks for the correction!

Re: Use plaintext email

#162

Post by SifJar »

zepolen wrote: post #157
neuronic wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

An internet forum (presumably we're referring to a public forum here) is a very different communication medium than email (especially when used in a professional context)

Re: Use plaintext email

#163

Post by tomjen3 »

mlang23 wrote: post #62
zaarn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you violate accessibility laws or your email client is shit, there is a text part or the HTML part is screen-reader compatible.

However, a significant portion of HTML mail I receive happily violates "accessibility laws" and omit to provide a text-only part. I know that, since I actually rely on accessibility to do my daily work.

How do they manage to do that? Embed the text as an image?

Re: Use plaintext email

#164

Post by scbrg »

wyldfire wrote: post #134
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 use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. It really does. Color, especially helps people find the relevant/critical part.

You could also skip the irrelevant parts. That too makes it easy to find the relevant part :-)

Re: Use plaintext email

#165

Post by tomjen3 »

masukomi wrote: post #135

I just want to put it out there, that regardless of if this is a "fight worth fighting" or not. Email was a nightmare for me. I could not keep up. Coworkers would catch themselves and laugh when they asked if I'd gotten an email. Switching to neomutt has changed everything for me. I now mmaintain Inbox Zero. I write in markdown. I convert it into a multipart email with HTML in one keystroke for everyone else. Other b…

What is it about neomutt that allows you to be that efficient with your emails?

Re: Use plaintext email

#166

Post by tln »

mbreese wrote: post #110
owenmarshall wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ri…

I absolutely agree -- the aspect of email I miss from the good ol' days was well-trimmed replies and doing so inline. Threaded inboxes and smart trimming helps, but not completely.

However I think that HTML clients handle this well enough but the etiquette has been completely lost.

    Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
    > Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
    >> Top-posting.
    >>> What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

Re: Use plaintext email

#167

Post by munmaek »

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…

Having slack doesn't necessarily mean having to be reachable 24/7. Chatrooms fill the use case of day-to-day chat and other more short-lived information.

As for distractions, that comes down to bad work culture. Hacker News & Lobste.rs are far more distracting for me. I simply get around to slack/email when I get around to it, with the exception of my boss pinging me. Thankfully he only messages me for important things.

If you email me I'm going to assume it's something actually important / something that will have some longevity vs some question on slack. Since people wear headphones due to idiotic open workspace culture, messaging someone on slack is far easier than walking up to them (unless your question is actually important/urgent, of which most are not).

Your phone or video call better be very important. Those are blockers, especially video calls. I prefer to call the latter time-wasters since, well, they're almost always a complete waste of my time. The only useful video calls I've done are with syncing up with another developer, which I cannot do locally now that I work remotely. Aside from this I prefer leaving the luxury of video calls for my parents.

Re: Use plaintext email

#168

Post by Dayshine »

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…

>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.

Can we?

Comments can't have tables, so you almost never see any actually tabular data like statistics. I frequently see people misstating copied across data, or getting confused by things that would be simple in a table.

Quoting from the article is very difficult, as laws and guidance often use formatting despite being very simple documents. I've run into this a few times when trying to quote GDPR guidance, and people very often misunderstand quotes.

People frequently struggle making lists, or having problems with ambiguity about which point a comment is replying to.

Code snippets just don't work on mobile.

> then plain text with very limited markup works best since it minimizes the required vertical scrolling and it allows you to see the overall discussion

Sure, if your discussion is short and shallow point-scoring! For in-depth discussion headings or any structure at all is really important.

Re: Use plaintext email

#169

Post by Aeolun »

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…

> Why require another medium for communication when email works just fine?

I’m guessing you’ve never actually worked with these chat clients yet?

The difference is light and day. Of course there is annoying parts, but like plaintext email I guess, just having everyone write in the same format soothes the brain.

And no awkward quotes or history in every damn email (because your client is going to mess up that thread!).

Re: Use plaintext email

#170

Post by DangitBobby »

DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #9
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…

The page footer might interest you. It directly answers your question. Quoting "But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?" This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.

That's pretty much a non-sequitur. HTML is better in email as well as "reference documents" according to the opinions of many. You don't like thing. Okay.
Post reply on HN