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Use plaintext email

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Re: Use plaintext email

#181

Post by earthboundkid »

scbrg wrote: post #171
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?

I would say that the real performance drain is top posting, which seems to go hand in hand with HTML emails. With top posting, in order to read a mail - especially one that is a few levels deep in a thread - becomes an exercise in jumping back and forth, trying to find context and make sense of who replies to what, finding relevant sentences (often hidden in a mess of signatures). With bottom posting and proper curat…

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.

Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

A: Top-posting.

Q: What is the most annoying thing in email?

Re: Use plaintext email

#182

Post by shriek »

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…

I'd argue that that's a shortcoming of the platform and not the medium in that context. Having the ability and abusing it are two completely different things.

Re: Use plaintext email

#183

Post by tripzilch »

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…

Please relax and think of the commenting guide lines.

Re: Use plaintext email

#184

Post by arbuge »

One interesting anecdote about plain text not being the default in most popular email clients come from my own PublicEmails.com email-to-blog-post project. People would experiment with it and the allowed list of HTML tags for formatting (https://publicemails.com/blog/display/772/37f6f81d9a) but would get confused when the tags would render verbatim instead of being processed correctly. They didn't realize they were in HTML mode by default in most email clients like Gmail, and that they would have to manually switch back to plain text if they wanted to use HTML tags.

I ended up adding a question to the FAQ to address this issue specifically, though people still get confused from time to time. There is a touch of irony about it - to get HTML tags to work, you have to be in plain text, not HTML mode. Once you're in HTML mode all that's needed for formatting is the client's own formatting controls.

Re: Use plaintext email

#185

Post by snowwrestler »

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.

This is true, but it's also true that plain text emails do not prevent phishing.

Re: Use plaintext email

#186

Post by snowwrestler »

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?

The cultural aspect of this web page is pretty clear in that the author even formats his HTML to look like plaintext, which is completely unnecessary from a technical perspective. In fact it took extra effort to do that, as opposed to just allowing each browser to supply its default font.

Re: Use plaintext email

#187

Post by Beldin »

scbrg wrote: post #171
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?

I would say that the real performance drain is top posting, which seems to go hand in hand with HTML emails. With top posting, in order to read a mail - especially one that is a few levels deep in a thread - becomes an exercise in jumping back and forth, trying to find context and make sense of who replies to what, finding relevant sentences (often hidden in a mess of signatures). With bottom posting and proper curat…

Top posting is orthogonal to the email's format. I've received plenty of top posts in plain text way back when.

Not doing top posting literally has confused recipients of my mails (almost all instances).

So now I'm a top poster as well: i use emails to communicate, not to confuse.

Re: Use plaintext email

#188

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Use plaintext email

#189

Post by scbrg »

Dayshine wrote: post #177
scbrg wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 question…

>The alternative is to spend an hour deciphering the blob of goo that is actual mail messages mixed with signatures, attachments You mention attachments, which implies you've been included in all the previous emails. In which case, your email client should be splitting them (often referred to as "conversation" view). Otherwise, how does it make any difference if the infinite nesting is at the top or the bottom? Or by…

I would say that top posting does mean replies without trimming. In theory, they're not the same, of course. In practice, I've seen top posting with trimming a total of... well, zero times.

And in either case, reading something from top to bottom is certainly easier than to read something in the order of: Last 3% of the message, followed by the bits that are 93-97% into the message, followed by the bits that are at 86-93% of the message, followed by the bits... every email is like watching Memento. With each scene in whatever typeface that particular person's email client thought was a good idea to enforce upon me. And sometimes purple.

Re: Use plaintext email

#190

Post by snowwrestler »

aloisdg wrote: post #7
joegreen wrote: post #2

I would like to read more details about "The former is strongly preferred". Why is plain text preferred and by whom?

Keep reading the article: HTML emails are mainly used for marketing - that is, emails you probably don't want to see in the first place. The few advantages they offer for end-users, such as links, inline images, and bold or italic text, aren't worth the trade-off. and more at https://useplaintext.email/#why-plaintext

The idea that marketing emails = "you don't want them" is fairly popular in some crowds, but it's contradicted by the tremendous business success of using marketing emails. The reality is that most people want and use marketing emails.

For example, I'm signed up for marketing emails from several airlines and these routinely save me money when booking vacations. Cheap airline tickets are a limited resource, so real-time notification of new availability has financial value to me.

Same with end-of-season sales for clothing I like. One company gives email recipients 1-2 days to shop before the sale is posted publicly on the website and social media.

It also ignores the tremendous popularity of email newsletters, which employ HTML formatting to improve the user experience, exactly the same way content websites do. In fact HTML email newsletters are often better than websites, because email clients don't execute javascript. The advertising is far less intrusive.

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