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Use plaintext email

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Re: Use plaintext email

#171

Post by scbrg »

josho wrote: post #133
bachmeier wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no good reason to I used html for years. Once my email volume reached a certain point, I went back to plain text because I can read it and respond to it much faster.

Neither you nor the poster provide a reason why. Why is it better? How does plain text make it faster to respond? Or even faster to read?

I would say that the real performance drain is top posting, which seems to go hand in hand with HTML emails.

With top posting, in order to read a mail - especially one that is a few levels deep in a thread - becomes an exercise in jumping back and forth, trying to find context and make sense of who replies to what, finding relevant sentences (often hidden in a mess of signatures).

With bottom posting and proper curated quoting, context is a glance away, and it's easy to see who said what in reply to what.

I'm sure this would be possible with HTML mails as well, but I've never seen it happen. It's all just a mess of hard to find information in the least sensible order imaginable.

Re: Use plaintext email

#172

Post by jeroenhd »

zaarn wrote: post #64
u801e wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can make Text-only links look fairly harmless too. Could you give an example? As far as I know, you cannot do something like making a link look like it belongs to a completely different domain.

Examples from what I've seen: https://account:paypal.com.login@verified-account.com/phish This, to the untrained eye, might at first glance look like a paypal.com link. In fact, it belongs to verified-account.com and it abuses the capability of URLs to contain a username and password to make it look legit.

Wow, I knew Firefox warns for these by default so I thought nobody would ever use this for a phishing attack anymore but it looks like Chrome just meekly follows the standard. That's too bad, really, this is a very easy way to create very realistic phishing mails.

Re: Use plaintext email

#173

Post by astrea »

u801e wrote: post #147
ubermonkey wrote: post #124

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…

> Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. 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. I suppose it's really a difference of a read once message versus having a discussion. In a read once message, you can format it like you describe. That's…

> But, we can communicate just fine without those features.

Surely professional communication has a different use case and requirements than random musings on an internet forum.

Re: Use plaintext email

#174

Post by b3n »

zepolen wrote: post #148
zaarn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Examples from what I've seen: https://account:paypal.com.login@verified-account.com/phish This, to the untrained eye, might at first glance look like a paypal.com link. In fact, it belongs to verified-account.com and it abuses the capability of URLs to contain a username and password to make it look legit.

Don't even need that account: at start, this works in chrome: https://www.paypal.com@google.com

In Firefox it tells me:

    You are about to log in to the site “google.com” with the username “www%2Epaypal%2Ecom”, but the website does not require authentication. This may be an attempt to trick you.
    
    Is “google.com” the site you want to visit?

Re: Use plaintext email

#175

Post by snowwrestler »

wyldfire wrote: post #134
ubermonkey wrote: post #124

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…

> Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. It really does. Color, especially helps people find the relevant/critical part.

It's true, in fact here's a good example of someone using color to improve their communication:

https://useplaintext.email/

Re: Use plaintext email

#176

Post by tjoff »

scbrg wrote: post #153
tjoff wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I've ever seen bottom-posting in my life. They have particular weak arguments against that as well. It is very useful when forwarding a message or including someone else as cc.

It is very useful for you, the sender. It is a nightmare for the receiver. Whenever I receive one of those forwarded top posted thirty mail long horrors I just ignore everything and hope I can guess context from whatever you wrote in the last email. The alternative is to spend an hour deciphering the blob of goo that is actual mail messages mixed with signatures, attachments, all being meaningless replies to question…

I feel it is very informative as the recipient.

Yes, everything you need to know ought to be in the mail itself but often you need context or surrounding details or just some information as to why the question arose.

You can in the very most cases figure that out by skimming a couple of previous mails in the thread. Very quick and saves another round trip, which can be very annoying if you are on different time-zones.

Re: Use plaintext email

#177

Post by Dayshine »

scbrg wrote: post #153
tjoff wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I've ever seen bottom-posting in my life. They have particular weak arguments against that as well. It is very useful when forwarding a message or including someone else as cc.

It is very useful for you, the sender. It is a nightmare for the receiver. Whenever I receive one of those forwarded top posted thirty mail long horrors I just ignore everything and hope I can guess context from whatever you wrote in the last email. The alternative is to spend an hour deciphering the blob of goo that is actual mail messages mixed with signatures, attachments, all being meaningless replies to question…

>The alternative is to spend an hour deciphering the blob of goo that is actual mail messages mixed with signatures, attachments

You mention attachments, which implies you've been included in all the previous emails. In which case, your email client should be splitting them (often referred to as "conversation" view).

Otherwise, how does it make any difference if the infinite nesting is at the top or the bottom? Or by "top posting" do you just mean replies without trimming?

Re: Use plaintext email

#178

Post by snowwrestler »

zepolen wrote: post #151
bwat49 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent email client will load images asynchronously. Many can also be configured to not load remote content at all until you allow it.

So loading the text part of emails only. That's precisely the topic of discussion.

HTML loads even if images do not, which means you still get formatting, bolding, font sizes, clickable links, tables, etc.

Re: Use plaintext email

#179

Post by u801e »

SifJar wrote: post #162
zepolen wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go and visit a forum where embedded images are allowed and tell me that there is any sort of "optimum" discussion over there. In the end what happens is people use text overlays in the IMAGES in order to reply to each other. Since you edited your response to mention the birthday card: Yea - on the one hand you can leave a boring "Happy Birthday" message with lots of glitter to make it memorable. Or you can make the m…

An internet forum (presumably we're referring to a public forum here) is a very different communication medium than email (especially when used in a professional context)

> An internet forum (presumably we're referring to a public forum here) is a very different communication medium than email

Not really. Take a look at any email discussion like the Linux kernel mailing list or the git mailing list. Same thing with newsgroups (usenet).

Re: Use plaintext email

#180

Post by scrollaway »

zepolen wrote: post #136
josho wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither you nor the poster provide a reason why. Why is it better? How does plain text make it faster to respond? Or even faster to read?

images loading..2% images loading..15% images loading..29% images loading..42% images loading..58% images loading..74% images loading..89% images loading..100% ____________________________________ | | | O O | | O | | \_/ | | MY LOGO | | My catchphrase | | | | | | | |------------------------------------| | | | Hi josho! | | | | This is why it's slower to read! | | | |____________________________________|

This isn't a thing, which makes me think you're arguing in bad faith.

Clients load images asynchronously, and no personal email is sent with a logo and catchphrase header. I've never seen that in my entire life and I've been using email with a lot of people, for a long time.

Formatting is an issue however, and the addition of formatting to email can be useful and add to the conversation.

To take the hn example again, the text portion of your comment is broken on mobile because hn doesn't support proper formatting. This has made your comment harder to read.

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