51–60 of 263 posts
The lower the score, the better. I know many who have a policy of "emails must be in plaintext only, with no attachments unless agreed to in advance; everything else gets deleted automatically."
Expand your group of people, because you clearly don’t know enough people.
The new Outlook desktop client is awful, but there's one silver lining and it's the retirement of the even more awful Word HTML renderer.
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SVG supports JavaScript.
Huh, I didn't really fully understand that about SVG. Thanks for the info. From what I'm reading, it seems that from inside an SVG script, you can call out to javascript functions of the parent page? That seems kinda surprising, I'm sure there are security policies around it, but it means that there are potential security and performance risks/considerations around hosting and serving SVG files that I didn't realize…
However, for a long time browsers were susceptible to denial of service attacks from maliciously crafted XML files, which SVG could exploit. (“Million laughs”). This doesn’t work in current versions but it might be a reason that SVGs are rejected.
HTML email was such a tragic mistake. I think the whole mess could have been averted if Markdown had been invented about twenty years earlier.
The real issue is bespoke rendering engines instead of just using a rule of "everything the current browser can do, but no js".
HTML email was such a tragic mistake. I think the whole mess could have been averted if Markdown had been invented about twenty years earlier.
Is this intended as sarcasm? Markdown renders to html, it's an authoring syntax that happens to be readable in it's "code" state. How would it solve email? The real issue is bespoke rendering engines instead of just using a rule of "everything the current browser can do, but no js".
I wish there was something like BrowserStack but you send a test email and it shows you how it renders on tons of different email clients on various platforms. It wouldn't work for web-based email like Gmail but it would still be useful.
* Disclaimer: Not affiliated, just a happy customer.
- [1] https://testi.at/
GNOME Evolution and Thunderbird, at least last I used it, have abysmal search speed, taking seconds to search through a local DB of a few thousand emails. So they're clearly using search tech much inferior to a local DB with indexes.
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Expand your group of people, because you clearly don’t know enough people.
They said many of the people they know only accept plaintext, not all of them. We should interpret each other generously.
It might seem like I’m criticizing the guy, but the thing is, there is a very real problem where people are looking at this from their own tech-forward perspective when this is a topic that affects many more people.
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It's easy to say this, but can you imagine the hodge-podge of proprietary garbage we'd have to deal with if you couldn't email a simple file attachment to someone?
I'm confused. How is HTML needed to attach a file (or to open the attachment)?
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They said many of the people they know only accept plaintext, not all of them. We should interpret each other generously.
My point, though, is about confirmation bias. Most people don’t know a lot of people who turn on plaintext email as a point of habit. It might seem like I’m criticizing the guy, but the thing is, there is a very real problem where people are looking at this from their own tech-forward perspective when this is a topic that affects many more people.
...and before the inevitable questioning I'm going to receive: no, I'm not German, and I know more people who aren't, with similar plaintext preferences.