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Use plaintext email

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Re: Use plaintext email

#191

Post by u801e »

Dayshine wrote: post #168
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…

>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 guidan…

> 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.

It can be done in plain text, but I don't commonly see it. For example:

  Column 1    Column 2
  first       second
  third       fourth
> 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.

I have quoted statutes from federal and state laws numerous times as part of a discussions where copying and pasting the text into a plain text format works. For example, a bullet point becomes an asterisk.

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

I think it's a lack of convention. I spent a lot of time on email lists, forums and newsgroups and have seen various conventions, but most people didn't struggle to make lists. The most common convention was just to use numbering or asterisks to indicate items in a list:

  * item 1
  * item 2
  3. item 3
  4. item 4
> Code snippets just don't work on mobile.

Code is one type of text that shouldn't be soft-wrapped, but the lines are frequently too long to render without wrapping on a mobile.

> Sure, if your discussion is short and shallow point-scoring

Not all online discussions are like that. For example, look at the mailing lists for the Linux kernel and git. I've also seen many substantial discussions on sites like this and reddit. In the past, I've learned a lot from newsgroups (usenet).

Re: Use plaintext email

#192

Post by Alex3917 »

kgwxd wrote: post #121
taneq wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://www.fwdeveryone.com

No query language yet, but you can export the cleaned up email threads and then query them however you want.

Re: Use plaintext email

#193

Post by jamespo »

u801e wrote: post #179
SifJar wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> An internet forum (presumably we're referring to a public forum here) is a very different communication medium than email Not really. Take a look at any email discussion like the Linux kernel mailing list or the git mailing list. Same thing with newsgroups (usenet).

Newsgroups aren't exactly vibrant any more, sadly.

Re: Use plaintext email

#194

Post by everdrive »

astrea wrote: post #173
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…

> But, we can communicate just fine without those features. Surely professional communication has a different use case and requirements than random musings on an internet forum.

My experience has been that some professionals are not actually very good at communicating in the first place. They won't read a detailed email, and instead prefer body language and rapport to substance. Perhaps the need for pictures and fonts in an email is related to this problem.

Re: Use plaintext email

#195

Post by knd775 »

bjpbakker wrote: post #82
Hitton wrote: post #46

The part about ProtonMail and Tutanota seems pretty biased. I would like to hear how the author suggests that they should implement IMAP and SMTP without compromising the encryption. It sounds like the author prefers dubious advantages to real improved security. That's quite ridiculous considering that according to him HTML emails are: >"... a security nightmare, are mostly used for advertising to you and tracking yo…

> the author prefers dubious advantages to real improved security Encrypting the data transfer doesn’t improve any of the HTML email security issues. So I fail to see how that would be “real improved security”. But I do share the authors sentiment on the failure to not using open standards of both Protonmail and Tutanota. So maybe I’m biased.

The data in a protonmail account is encrypted with your own key. How is protonmail supposed to encrypt an email if they receive it unencrypted over SMTP?

Re: Use plaintext email

#196

Post by superkuh »

owenmarshall wrote: post #13

I’d love someone to convince me I’m wrong - but I think we’ve lost this fight. Years of use of plaintext hostile clients by people who read our emails means bottom posting or inline replies are seen as extremely strange, and impossible when you have one of those “seven email deep” threads forwarded to you. (I know, I know, “snip it down”, but sometimes I just don’t have those minutes in my day ;)) Wrapping as well ha…

There's no losing as long as you're being the change you want to see. I will always send plaintext emails and I have the technical skill to dig into the raw email and decode the encoded HTML data manually or rip out the relevant authorization URL/strings.

Re: Use plaintext email

#197

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

In terms of phishing, plain text emails can still carry malicious attachments, which can be very dangerous.

Plain text does not prevent phishing!

Re: Use plaintext email

#198

Post by a3n »

zepolen wrote: post #151
bwat49 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That may be the reason for some people. I disallow loading images until I click, for security and privacy reasons. But I want to see pictures of my aunt's dog if she sends it.

Re: Use plaintext email

#199

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

wongarsu wrote: post #19
DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

If your emails are reference documents then I would argue that you're using email wrong.

Re: Use plaintext email

#200

Post by ddevault »

snowwrestler wrote: post #185
ddevault wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, but I think it's fair to say that they make it more difficult.
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