Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email • Hacker News Board

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#111

Post by chrismorgan » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 1:53 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #108

ktpsns wrote: post #4

It would be really nice to have a small and simple markup language, say some markdown standard, to be the layouting language for E-Mails. No (external) images, just links, lists, headings, basic formatting. HTML E-Mails are a security nightmare, even if "only" CSS is "allowed" and JS/iframes/external images are not loaded.

You're basically advocating for text/richtext (aka text/enriched), which was originally proposed explicitly as a replacement for HTML in email. It failed essentially because everyone who didn't want HTML wanted only plain text, and everyone who wanted something like HTML was happy to just use HTML. Factoid of the day: Netscape added support for a tag to text/enriched bodies, and that support remains in every client t…

From RFC 1896:

> There are other text formatting standards which meet some of these criteria. In particular, HTML and SGML have come into widespread use on the Internet. However, there are two important reasons that this document further promotes the use of text/enriched in Internet mail over other such standards:

> 1. Most MIME-aware Internet mail applications are already able to either properly format text/enriched mail or, at the very least, are able to strip out the formatting commands and display the readable text. The same is not true for HTML or SGML.

> 2. The current RFC on HTML [RFC-1866] and Internet Drafts on SGML have many features which are not necessary for Internet mail, and are missing a few capabilities that text/enriched already has.

> For these reasons, this document is promoting the use of text/enriched until other Internet standards come into more widespread use. For those who will want to use HTML, Appendix B of this document contains a very simple C program that converts text/enriched to HTML 2.0 described in [RFC-1866].

It sounds to me like text/enriched was being proposed not so much as a replacement for HTML, but because HTML and related technologies were not yet mature enough. This wording expressly frames text/enriched as a stop-gap measure.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#112

Post by jcranmer » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 1:56 PM UTC

This resource would be more useful if it also indicated support for relevant email-only features:

* Blocking of remote resource loads

* Which resources can be loaded via multipart/related and cid: links.

* How are doctype-less HTML bodies loaded

* "Leaking" of HTML parts in a multipart/mixed message

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#113

Post by tln » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 1:57 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #6

> This page ranks email clients based on their support among the 58 HTML and CSS features listed on Can I email. > (Because every test is done manually, some features might not have been tested on every email client.) I wonder, could they not create a single test email exercising all 58 features? Then one would just have to open the test email in a given client and compare it to a reference rendering. (Kind of like t…

I'm guessing the feature list has grown over time. Each time more features are added, 58 clients need to be checked.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#114

Post by tatersolid » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 2:02 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #106

marban wrote: post #47

Anyone wanna chime in on conversion rates when it comes to styled vs. plain text? I always hear that the latter converts better, i.e. "Make it look like as if it was sent by a friend" and obviously it's a business related matter but I wonder why plain isn't used more often when visuals/emotion aren't the #1 selling points.

Thinking in terms of "conversion rates" feels to me like the reason why we're in this mess. Email to me isn't about conversion and advertising newsletters. It's about written information, so there's no reason to even support HTML, in most cases. Arguably there's situation where an image will help in conveying information, or where a table will make information more readable. There's no situation where CSS is required…

Written information clearly benefits from bold, italics, ordered and unordered lists, section headers, etc. Normal people don’t really understand text surrounded by underscores or asterisks (I never receive messages with those constructs from non-technical people).

Formatting lists or indented quotes (also common in “normal” email usage) using white spaces and other semi-arbitrary characters is tedious and brittle.

The “rich text” features of HTML email definitely improve readability and understanding when used with restraint.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#115

Post by duxup » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 2:22 PM UTC

grenoire wrote: post #9

Christ on a bike, the state of Outlook on Windows is absolutely miserable. I knew it by experience when I started preparing HTML signatures for our company, but seeing the list makes me even sadder about the absolute state of incompetency caused by legacy systems in Microsoft. For those uninformed, Outlook on Windows effectively works on a terrible (and terribly old) implementation of HTML that was initially develope…

I'd love to hear from some insiders how all these non standard outputs get decided inside MS. I can imagine a lot of scenarios based on experience and just thinking it out but I'd love to hear the real story.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#116

Post by ivanhoe » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 2:29 PM UTC

I've spent a year of my life working on a front-end for visual composer tool for emails, and it was a horrible experience, time-travel back to IE6 era. I wish there was some tool like this back then, I'd probably keep it open in a tab all the time. We desperately need for someone to finally win this mail client war and some standardization to emerge.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#117

Post by lhorie » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 2:32 PM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #116

I've spent a year of my life working on a front-end for visual composer tool for emails, and it was a horrible experience, time-travel back to IE6 era. I wish there was some tool like this back then, I'd probably keep it open in a tab all the time. We desperately need for someone to finally win this mail client war and some standardization to emerge.

IIRC CampaignMonitor has had a pretty good resource for many years: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#118

Post by jraph » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #104

other_herbert wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a recent request from a product owner to style the subject line... I said we can't do that and that I don't want to live in a world where senders can change the font or size of the subject in an email.... Can you imagine the crap we would have from spam in that case?!

Y̗̳̬͍̘͚o͘u͏ ͏̬̟̩h̦̕a̰̖͍̟v̧̯̜͉͙̖͖͉e҉̳̲̙͚̗̬ ̤͚͉̀w̢̫͎̮̼͇o̷̮̙̩n̪͙͎̠͔ ̻̮a̛̭ ̡̪̤̻ͅp̵̭͇r̩͉į̬̺̭̯͍͙z̯͈͟e!͖̖͈̯ ie don't any mua let you use UTF8? 𝔻𝕠𝕖𝕤 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤 𝕨𝕠𝕣𝕜?

The first one does not work great in a terminal. The words are readable but I don't get the full experience. The second one, pretty good.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#119

Post by andrewkdinh » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 2:40 PM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #116

I've spent a year of my life working on a front-end for visual composer tool for emails, and it was a horrible experience, time-travel back to IE6 era. I wish there was some tool like this back then, I'd probably keep it open in a tab all the time. We desperately need for someone to finally win this mail client war and some standardization to emerge.

> We desperately need for someone to finally win this mail client war and some standardization to emerge.

Like all things, we need competition in this field. The Gmail web interface is already the most prevalent mail client. Because of this, Google can and has already started controlling the future of email. Just look at AMP for email. I agree with standardization, but not by having only one email client.

Re: Can I Email: ‘Can I Use’ for email

#120

Post by jraph » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

claar wrote: post #103

svat wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good question. The actual size of the images is not large: the problem is that I can visually see the email take a while to load properly, even for an email containing just two PNG images that are 2941 bytes and 6333 bytes respectively. If nearly every sentence were to be interrupted a few times with such delayed-loading images, the reading experience would be rather poor. (This was with the images self-cont…

Try embedding Base64 images in the email instead:

That's what the LaTeX It! Thunderbird add-on [1] does I think. Good extension by the way. Not sure it will work with Thunderbird 68, I didn't check.

[1] https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/latex...