The only safe email is text-only email • Hacker News Board

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#121

Post by zwp » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 9:01 PM UTC

stephenr wrote: post #89

zwp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, looks like text/markdown email is coming slowly: https://stackoverflow.com/a/25812177 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7763 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7764 (March 2016) Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13176743

The RFC's are just about defining the Media Type 'text/markdown' aren't they? Just because they used to be called MIME types and were designed for email, I wouldn't treat those RFC's as being about email support specifically.

Sure, it could be used elsewhere. OTOH 7763 calls out email as a use case three times and in section 5 Examples "email attachment" is the only example.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#122

Post by alkonaut » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 9:24 PM UTC

cozzyd wrote: post #73

ryanbrunner wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emails can send in both formats for a single message, so it's possible and even likely that most mailing lists, etc. he receives send in both formats. In my experience, even most marketing e-mails are at least somewhat good about this. I'm 99% sure that Gmail will still send a plaintext e-mail inferred from your HTML content whenever you send, so it's not quite accurate to say it doesn't send in plaintext.

I checked and, at least for a plaintext mesdage, Gmail on Android sends both plain text and HTML.

"gmail" and "inbox by gmail" are two different apps (on all platforms)

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#123

Post by alkonaut » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 9:29 PM UTC

proactivesvcs wrote: post #119

alkonaut wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over 99.5% of the email I receive is either plaintext or renders perfectly legible in plain. Is that representative? Where do you get email from? Did you change preferences on things like mailing lists in order to get to that percentage? Also: what kind of client do you use? iOS mail does send plain text emails as text/plain (which is fantastic) but if you look at e.g. inbox (gmail) it doesn't even allow sending pl…

I run two email addresses: one business, one personal. As you may imagine, the emails I get between the two are quite different. I'm using Thunderbird and always, when given the choice, opt for plain text email. I find Thunderbird does a very good job of rendering HTML email legible (easy to read) and functional (links work, etc). Perhaps once a month, maybe less, I have to use the toolbar button "Show HTML Temp" to…

I think the first reason people don't care for installing e.g. Thunderbird is that they check mail on a) mobile, b) work (which is usually outlook, or at least mandated by someone else).

If I asked 100 friends "did you use email today" 99 would say yes. If I said "did you do it on a computer" then 50 would say yes (those that work at an office). If I said "was it your own computer" then maybe 1 would say yes.

I think for us that sit at our own computers regularly, it's hard to imagine just how extremely rare it is for people to actually use desktop/laptops for personal use these days.