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Use plaintext email

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Re: Use plaintext email

#271

Post by jancsika »

> Top posting

> When you reply to an email, many email clients will infer and include a quoted version of the message you're replying to above the text of your reply, or else prompt if the context is ambiguous. This is normal-- it happens in clients that conform to RFC -1 which use data gleaned from your input to prevent long email threads containing the entire history of the discussion in an increasingly long and nested footer on every email. This is called "top post prevention" and is required in all conforming clients. Please email your admin if your client doesn't conform to this specification.

Re: Use plaintext email

#272

Post by abjKT26nO8 »

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…

What I hate about HTML email is that it tends to set its own font size, sometimes even font face. Like... Keep your dirty hands away from my config of how I like my mails to be displayed when I read them. But no, every mail is now a snowflake and has to have its own styling, even though it doesn't provide any value.

Re: Use plaintext email

#273

Post by deftnerd »

snowwrestler wrote: post #261
ddevault wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If an HTML phishing email is hiding an obviously malicious URL behind an image or button, then yeah, that URL would be more visible in a plain text email. But it's also visible in the address bar of the browser after you click it... and people will fill in the form anyway. Plain text doesn't solve complacency and distraction, it doesn't solve URL composition tricks and redirect wrappers, it doesn't solve spoofing, an…

Ideally, it would be nice to enable phishing links to be identified before they are clicked. This could prevent the remote server from logging any metadata about the browser accessing the link (date/time, browser type, ip address, etc). It also prevents any possibility of browser vulnerabilities being taken advantage of.

What might be an interesting solution is to standardize an addition in the SMTP standard to require the ability to verify message ID's and also return some kind of Content Security Policy equivilent.

Every mail message gets assigned an ID. When you receive a message from support@paypal.com, it would be nice if your mail client could connect to paypal.com and ask if the message ID was legitimate and it would reply that it was, and that the only URL's whitelisted in the email would be example.com, anotherexample.com, etc.

Some downsides that would need to be addressed is that this would mean email clients would inadvertently expose their IP address to the sending server, and some thought would have to be used to prevent fraudulent emails from just replaying existing message ID's.

I just feel like there is a possible solution that the industry isn't seeing or implementing.

Re: Use plaintext email

#274

Post by ben509 »

baud147258 wrote: post #202
robenkleene wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is supposed to be easy to quote, just like you’ve used a block quote in your comment. I assume it’s obvious that rich text is difficult to quote, but a quick explanation is that the invisible formatting characters used to represent rich text behave inconsistently when re-contextualized for a quote.

> it’s obvious that rich text is difficult to quote I don't see how. It's just the same as plain text.

It would be easy if there were a single accepted way to quote in rich text. (Seriously, the block quote tag has been around for eternity!) I don't think it works well in plain text either.

Re: Use plaintext email

#275

Post by deftnerd »

b3n wrote: post #174
zepolen wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't even need that account: at start, this works in chrome: https://www.paypal.com@google.com

In Firefox it tells me: You are about to log in to the site “google.com” with the username “www%2Epaypal%2Ecom”, but the website does not require authentication. This may be an attempt to trick you. Is “google.com” the site you want to visit?

Gold star for Firefox! That's an excellent feature.

Re: Use plaintext email

#276

Post by hmans »

abjKT26nO8 wrote: post #272
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…

What I hate about HTML email is that it tends to set its own font size, sometimes even font face. Like... Keep your dirty hands away from my config of how I like my mails to be displayed when I read them. But no, every mail is now a snowflake and has to have its own styling, even though it doesn't provide any value.

Configure your email client to override font sizes/styles with your preference, and if your email client doesn't do this, tell the developers that you'd like to have it.

Re: Use plaintext email

#277

Post by unixsheikh »

I hate HTML email with a passion.

In more that 20 years I cannot remember when I last saw a well marked up HTML email that wasn't miss aligned due to missing closing tags or some other stupid mistake. They are always filled with utter useless and distracting crap and for some reason people tend to think that that is better than simply focusing on the flipping point of the message.

And no, I don't want people to embed screenshots in the message body, I much prefer attachments.

Claws-mail has a beautiful setting called: "Render HTML messages as text", and if that doesn't work because the HTML message is too messed up -> Delete to trash!

Edit: People can't figure out how to make relative well formed HTML for the browser, yet someone thought it was a good idea to introduce the mess to email. Go figure!

Re: Use plaintext email

#278

Post by Eric_WVGG »

abjKT26nO8 wrote: post #272
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…

What I hate about HTML email is that it tends to set its own font size, sometimes even font face. Like... Keep your dirty hands away from my config of how I like my mails to be displayed when I read them. But no, every mail is now a snowflake and has to have its own styling, even though it doesn't provide any value.

In retrospect, Markdown should have been lingua franca for rich email.

Re: Use plaintext email

#279

Post by yyyk »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #262
yyyk wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML email in practice doesn't need much more than what w3m supports, in some places less - no need for w3m's frame, cookie, or FTP support. w3m is smaller than mutt. Limiting HTML mail to an agreed subset could actually be a winnable fight compared to more impractical suggestions.

As someone who uses w3m to read HTML emails sometimes, it's very hit and miss. Perhaps 50% of emails are easily readable in w3m, on a good day.

Let's say 50% (or even 30%). How much more code would have been needed to correctly render most of the rest? I strongly doubt it's 200 MiB, probably much closer to w3m's size. HTML email is in practice a large subst of HTML4+a tiny bit of CSS.

Re: Use plaintext email

#280

Post by dwild »

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…

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

That doesn't sound optimum use of image at all.

> Or you can make the message memorable.

And use image that make it even more memorable at the same time.

Text and images are tools, both can be misused, but that doesn't means that they are bad. Remember SMS text? Works for sure, clearly not optimal, yet text is pretty good to make message memorable.

I can explain in a thousand word an issue on a page, but you can also just share a screenshot. That's an optimum use of images. Sure you could just write "see screenshot #1", "see screenshot #2", etc.. but I'm pretty sure you'll agree that it's not optimum.

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