321–330 of 345 posts
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That does not seem like much of an assumption; all modern mail clients that I am aware of do this.
The problem isn't the clients, it's the senders. And as someone who uses Mutt, the vast majority of HTML emails don't have usable plaintext versions.
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The problem isn't the clients, it's the senders. And as someone who uses Mutt, the vast majority of HTML emails don't have usable plaintext versions.
What kind of mail client doesn't send mail? I am talking about someone using a mail client to draft and send an email.
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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.
You’ve just made the problem an externality. While you have the skill and desire to do that - and to be clear, as a mu user I do the same dance when I need - inbound messages are rarely the problem for me. What is a problem is outbound messages. When I try to do (what I think is) the right thing and trim the message and reply inline or bottom post, confusion abounds. I’ve had messages missed because the recipients to…
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…
Even with "load remote images" turned off, Apple Mail will "helpfully" load them anyway if you forward an email.
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> Q. Why is top-posting such a bad thing? It is not, so long as you first quote the relevant part you are replying to. At some point you can also trim the tail as you see fit (I don't find it necessary because my mail client does a good enogh job at hiding that part unless I click on a "show wverything" button. > 2019-07-24 10:50 earthboundkid wrote: > Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? >> 2019-07-23 23:55 someo…
That's called interleaved posting and it's the preferred style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_styl...
Technically it appears that I'm advocating for a combination of inline and top posting. Quoting the relevant wikipedia part:
> The interleaved reply style can also be combined with top-posting: selected points are quoted and replied to, as above, and then a full copy of the original message is appended.
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For the vast majority of people html formatting is better and more efficient for their communication needs. Bold and highlighted text, section headers, tables and inline images are all very very standard and useful things to have in emails. These are not niche use cases.
I have never seen an email with a table in it, HTML or not. Inline images are not useful, just attach them. Leave your giant signature with your company logo at the door. What's left is section headers and bold text. Use asterisks for emphasis and # for section headers and you can communicate quite effectively. We seem to manage pretty well here on Hacker News without most of these features, wouldn't you say?
People manage on HN but on reddit people freely use these formattings fairly regularly and nobody seems to complain about that.
Heck, using the markdown standard for formatting is already going away from text/plain and towards text/markdown, which isn't strictly plaintext.
>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!
Your paypal account was deactivated, please visit
https://www.paypal.com@google.com to reactivate it.
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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.
HTML has a hierarchical structure. quoted content It's far better than trying to keep count of how many ">" are in play, and deal with the vagaries of soft linebreaks and hard linebreaks and wrapping of plaintext.
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> If text is softwrapped, then there's no way to prevent that text from getting wrapped unless you use some time of mark up like HTML or markdown Precisely. HTML and markdown separate content from presentation, so content that should never be wrapped - like ```code``` or code is handled properly.
Yes, but that doesn't have a sensible fallback for clients that don't support html or markdown. format=flowed does have a sensible fallback.
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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.
Then you are better off using some format that can stand alone as a file such as PDF. If it is a reference document that is intended to be edited on an ongoing basis it is better to use something like a wiki. Having to root around in your email to find a reference document is pretty inefficient and annoying.