Use plaintext email • Hacker News Board

Re: Use plaintext email

#341

Post by benoliver999 » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #165

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?

For me it's not mutt so much as being able to write and edit in vim. I can reply in-line, quickly chop out chunks of text etc etc.

I'm not one to shout at people for not using plain text etc but I personally quite like it.

Re: Use plaintext email

#342

Post by Sir_Cmpwn » Fri, Jul 26, 2019, 11:31 AM UTC

stevekemp wrote: post #334

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you fill out this survey for me? https://paste.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/be4f2eee45046e069a4bb175d9d539...

No instructions on how/where to reply so here you go! 1. What is your mail client? Lumail. Console based. lumail.org / github.com/lumail/lumail 2. Can you give me plain english instructions for composing plaintext emails by default? Lumail is a console-based client, much like mutt. To compose an email your editor is launched. If no editor is configured vim will be used. Plaintext composition is the only thing that is…

Thanks! Since you use vim by default and vim does the right thing by default, I added your client to the list of just-works clients.

Re: Use plaintext email

#343

Post by mwcampbell » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 4:58 AM UTC

u801e wrote: post #191

Dayshine wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 d…

FWIW, your plain-text table is not as accessible with a screen reader as an HTML one. For the past two decades or so, screen readers have had commands for navigating tables, reading the row and column headers, etc. But those only work with something like HTML or a Word document, where the structure is well-defined.

Re: Use plaintext email

#344

Post by thatguyagain » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 11:54 AM UTC

setr wrote: post #141

robenkleene wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Is it that you’ve never heard of the concept of quoting a passage of an email? Or are you saying “sure people do that, but it doesn’t matter if it’s easy”?

He means that he’s never heard of it as a “supposed to be”, or rather, a core feature/reason to use email. Which is my experience as well — it happens to be easy to quote. The real quoting that email supports, the reply w/ embedded copy of replied email, is unaffected by html/plaintext choice.

Exactly.

Re: Use plaintext email

#345

Post by mwcampbell » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

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.

To clarify, is your problem with HTML emails that omit a text/plain part, or only HTML emails that have images with no alt text? If the latter, I think the solution is to advocate for accessibility in HTML emails, not plain-text emails. After all, well-structured hypertext has its own accessibility benefits, since most current screen readers have lots of commands for navigating that structure. This is why I disagree with advocating for plain-text email in the name of accessibility, as this campaign does.